(1932)

Characters
Ferdinand Bardamu	a war-wounded, disillusioned, cynical neurotic and a rogue. Successively a medical student, soldier, mental patient, pimp, flea expert, Ford worker, doctor, music-hall supernumerary, and administrator of a madhouse, he undergoes experiences that would tax the strongest constitution and the sanest mind. In his restless shifting from one job to another and from one locale to another, he resembles not only the rogues of picaresque fiction but also his creator, Ferdinand Céline.
Leon Robinson	his friend, an unscrupulous cynic who turns up, like a personal demon, everywhere Ferdinand goes. The planner of the bombing of old Madame Henrouille, he is temporarily blinded by his own bomb. He is later killed by Madelon.
Madelon	an attractive young woman of easy morals. Engaged to Leon, she becomes insanely jealous when he attempts to get rid of her; and after threatening to inform the police of his murder of Madame Henrouille, she shoots him in a rage and flees.
Lola	an American Red Cross worker who becomes Ferdinand’s mistress in France and who later permits him to live with her for a time after he comes to New York.
Musyne	a dancer and prostitute, another of Ferdinand’s mistresses.
Madame Herote	a Parisian lingerie-glove-bookshop keeper and a prostitute.
Doctor Bestombes	a psychiatrist in a mental hospital.
Roger Puta	a jeweler for whom Ferdinand works before the war; during the war, he is a driver for a cabinet minister.
Lieutenant Grappa	a brutal officer in charge of Topo station in Africa.
Molly	an American prostitute in Detroit; Ferdinand is briefly in love with her.
The Abbe Protiste	a priest who arranges for Leon and Madame Henrouille to set up a little business in Toulouse, showing mummies in a crypt to tourists.
Tania	a Polish friend of Ferdinand whose lover dies in Berlin.
Doctor Baryton	a psychiatrist who operates a madhouse, becomes mad about English (which he learns from Ferdinand and from reading Macaulay), and rushes off to England and other lands, leaving the madhouse in Ferdinand’s charge.
Doctor Serge Parapine	a medical researcher later employed as a staff physician at Baryton’s asylum; a friend of Ferdinand.
The Henrouilles	a Parisian family for whom Ferdinand performs various medical services.
Bebert	a young boy, a patient of Ferdinand, who dies of typhoid fever.
Gustave Mandamour	a traffic policeman, a friend of Ferdinand and Leon.
Sophie	a voluptuous Slovak nurse hired by Ferdinand; he is fascinated by her.

IT ALL BEGAN JUST LIKE THAT. I HADN'T SAID ANYTHING. I HAD-
N'T said a word. It was Arthur Ganate who started me off. Arthur,
who was studying medicine the same as me, a pal of mine. What
happened was that we met on the Place Clichy. After lunch. He
seemed to want to talk to me. So I listened. "Don't let's stay out
here,'' he said. "Let's go inside." So I went along in with him.
"It's grim," he said, "out here on the terrasse. Come this way."
We noticed that there was nobody in the street's because of the
heat; no traffic, nothing. And when it's very cold there's nobody
about, either; why, I even remember that it was he who said to me,
speaking about this, "Everybody in Paris seems to be busy but
actually they only walk about all day, and the proof of it is that
when the weather's bad, when it's too cold or too hot, they dis-
appear; they're all inside cafes, drinking white coffee or bocks.
Isn't that so? They talk of this being an age of rush and hurry.
How d' you make that out? Everything's changing, they say. But
it isn't true. Nothing has really changed. They just go on being
impressed by themselves and that's all. Which isn't new, either.
A few words have changed--but not many of them, even. Two or
three little ones here and there . . .'' And very proud at having
come to these important conclusions, we sat back, feeling pleased
with life, and watched the ladies of the cafe.

Afterwards, conversation turned on President Poincare, who that
morning was going to open a show of lapdogs, and from him to
Le Temps, where we'd read about it. "Now there's a really great
paper for you!" said Arthur, trying to get a rise out of me. "There
isn't another paper like it for defending the interests of the
French race."

"And I suppose the French race needs it, seeing that it doesn't
exist!" said I promptly, to show that I knew what I was talking
about.

"But of course it exists! And a very splendid one it is too!" he
insisted. "It's the finest race in the world, and don't you believe
any fool who tells you it isn't!" He had started in to harangue me
for all he was worth. I held my ground, of course.

"That's not true! What you call the race is only that great heap
of worm-eaten sods like me, bleary, shivering and lousy, who,
coming defeated from the four corners of the earth, have ended
up here, escaping from hunger, illness, pestilence and cold. They
couldn't go further because of the sea. That's your France and
those are your Frenchmen."

"Bardamu," he said to me then, gravely and a little sadly, "our
fathers were as good as us; you mustn't speak of them in this
way. . . ."

"You're right, Arthur, you're right there. Venomous yet docile,
outraged, robbed, without guts and without spirit, they were as
good as us all right. You certainly said it! Nothing really changes.
Habits, ideas, opinions, we change them not at all, or if we do, we
change them so late that it's no longer worth while. We are born
loyal and we die of it. Soldiers for nothing, heroes to all the world,
monkeys with a gift of speech, a gift which brings us suffering,
we are its minions. We belong to suffering; when we misbehave,
it tightens its hold on us. We have its fingers always round our
throats, which makes it difficult to talk; you have to be careful,
if you want to be able to eat. . . . The merest slip and you're
strangled. . . . Life's not worth living. . . ."

"But there is still love, Bardamu!"

"Love, Arthur, is a poodle's chance of attaining the infinite, and
personally I have my pride," I answered him.

"Talk about yourself, you're nothing but an anarchist!" Always
the little devil, you see, and just about as advanced as possible.

"You said it, fathead; I am an anarchist! And to prove it, there's
a sort of social prayer for vengeance I've written. You can tell me
this minute what you think of it. ‘Wings of Gold' it's called."
And I recited it to him:

"A God who counts the minutes and the pence, a desperate God,
sensual and grunting like a pig. A pig with wings of gold
which tumbles through the world, with exposed belly waiting
for caresses, lo, 'tis he, behold our master! Embrace, embrace!"

"That little piece of yours doesn't make sense in actual life.
Personally, I'm for the established order of things and l'm not
fond of politics. Moreover, if the day should come when my country
needs me, I certainly shan't hang back; it will find me ready to
lay down my life for it. So there." That was his answer to me.

At that very moment War was drawing near to us without our
realizing it, and I wasn't at all in a sensible mood. Our short
but exciting argument had taken it out of me. On top of that too,
I was a bit put out because the waiter had seemed to think I had
under-tipped him. Anyway, I made it up with Arthur, so as to
put a stop to all this nonsense, once and for all. We agreed about
almost everything, really.

"You're right," I said, wishing to be conciliatory. "You're quite
right of course, really. But after all, we are all in the same boat, we
are all galley slaves together, rowing like the devil--you certainly
can't deny that. Sitting on nails to it, too. And what do we get
out of it? Not a thing. A big stick across our backs, that's all, and
a great deal of misery, and a hell of a lot of stinking lies poured
into our ears! ‘A fellow must work,' is what they say. It's the
lousiest part of the whole business, this work of theirs. You're stuck
down in the hold, puffing and panting, all of a muck-sweat and
stinking like polecats. . . . And up on the bridge, not giving a
damn, the masters of the ship are enjoying God's fresh air with
lovely pink ladies drenched in perfume sitting on their knees.
They have you up on deck. Then they put on their top-hats and
let fly at you as follows:

"'See here, you set of sods'' they say. 'War's declared. You're
going to board the bastards on Country Number 2 yonder and
you're going to smash them to bits! Now get on with it. There's
all the stuff you'll need aboard. All together now. Let's have it--
as loud as you can make it: "God save Country Number 1!"
You've got to make them hear you a long way off. There's a medal
and a coughdrop for the man who shouts the loudest! God in
Heaven! And if there's any of you who don't want to die at sea, of
course, you can go and die on land, where it takes even less time
than it does here!''

"You've just about hit it," agreed Arthur, who'd certainly become
very easy to convince.

Whereupon, damn me if a regiment of soldiers didn't come
marching past the cafe where we were sitting, with the colonel
in front on his horse and all, looking simply fine and as smart
as you make them. I gave just one great leap of enthusiasm.

"I'll go and find out if that's what it's like!" I cried to Arthur,
and off I went to join up, as fast as my legs would carry me.

"Don't be such a bloody fool, Ferdinand!" yelled Arthur after
me, annoyed, I suppose by the effect my heroic gesture was
having on the onlookers.

I was rather sick that that should be the attitude he took
toward it, but that didn't stop me. I was striding along in step.
"Here I am and I'll see it through," I said to myself.

"We'll see, you mutt, you!" I managed to get in at him, before
we turned the corner, with the regiment marching along behind
the colonel and the band. That's exactly, word for word, how
it happened.

We went on marching for a long time. There were streets then
there were still more streets, with civilians and their wives cheering
us as we passed, and throwing flowers to us from the cafe tables, by
the stations and from the steps of crowded churches. What a lot
of patriots there were! And then, after a bit, there began to be
fewer patriots. . . . Rain came down, and there were fewer and
fewer of them, and then finally no one cheered at all, not another
cheer along the road.

Were we all by ourselves then? A column of men, in fours
behind each other? The music stopped. Then I said to myself,
as I saw how things were going, "It's not such fun, after all. I
doubt if it's worth it." And I was going to go back. But it was
too late! They'd shut the gate behind us, quietly; the civilians
had. We were caught, like rats in a trap.




ONCE ONE'S IN IT, ONE'S IN IT UP TO THE NECK. THEY PUT US ON
horseback and then, after two months of that, they put us back on
foot. Perhaps because it cost too much. Anyway, one morning the
colonel was looking for his horse; his orderly had gone off with it,
no one knew where, somewhere no doubt where bullets sang less
merrily than in the middle of the road. Because that's exactly
where we finished up, the colonel and I, plumb in the middle of
the road, with me holding the forms on which he wrote out orders.
Far away up the road, as far as you could see, there were two
black dots, in the middle of it, like us--only they were two
Germans, very busy shooting. They'd been doing that for a good
quarter of an hour.

The colonel perhaps knew why those two fellows were firing
and the Germans maybe knew it too; but as for me, quite frankly,
I didn't at all. However far back I remembered, the Germans had
nothing against me. I had always been quite friendly and polite
to them. I knew the Germans a bit, I'd even been to school with
them as a kid, near Hanover. I'd talked their language. They
were then a lot of noisy little idiots, with the pale and furtive
eyes of wolves; we all used to go and neck the girls in the woods
near by, where we'd also shoot with bows or with the little pistols
you could get for four marks. We used to drink sweet beer. But
that was one thing and now letting fly at each other, without
even coming over to talk first, and right in the middle of the
road, was another,--not the same thing at all. It was altogether
too damn different.

The war, in fact, was everything that one didn't understand.
It couldn't go on.

Had something extraordinary then come over these people?
Something which I didn't feel at all? I must have failed to
notice it.

At any rate, my feelings towards them had not changed. In
spite of everything, I felt I wanted to understand their brutal
behaviour; but even more I wanted, I terribly wanted, to go
away, it all suddenly seemed so much the result of a tremendous
mistake.

"In this sort of business there's nothing for it; the only thing
to do is to shove out of it." That's what I said to myself. After
all. . . .

Over our heads, an inch or half an inch away, one after the
other those long tentative steel strings which bullets make when
they want to kill you came twanging in the warm air of summer.
Never have I felt so futile as among all those bullets in that
sunshine. A vast, a universal ramp.

I wasn't more than twenty at the time. In the distance were
deserted farmhouses and open and empty churches, as if the
peasants every one of them had left these hamlets for the day,
to go to some gathering at the other end of the canton and had
left in our keeping all they possessed,--their countryside, their
carts with upturned shafts, their fields and patches, the road, the
trees and even the cows, a dog on its chain, everything. So that
we should not be disturbed and could do what we wanted while
they were away. It seemed a kindly thought on their part. "All
the same," said I to myself, "if only they hadn't gone off, if only
there was still somebody about around here, we surely shouldn't
be behaving so badly--so disgracefully! We wouldn't have dared
with them here. Only there's no one to see us. We're by ourselves
like newly married folk doing dirty things when every one's
left."

And I thought too (behind a tree) that I should love to have
the biggest Jingo of the lot here with me, to explain what he
would do when a bullet hit him slap in the pan.

These Germans, squatting on the road, sniping away so obstinate-
ly, weren't shooting well but they seemed to have ammunition
enough and to spare, stacks of it obviously. No, the war wasn't
by any means over. Our colonel, I must say, was showing amazing
coolness. He walked about, right in the middle of the road, up
and down in the thick of these bullets, just as carelessly as if
he were waiting for a friend on a station platform; a little im-
patiently, that's all.

As a matter of fact, I may as well admit that I've never liked
the country, anyway; I've always found it depressing, with all
its endless puddles and its houses where nobody's ever in and its
roads leading nowhere. But with a war on as well, it's intolerable.
The wind had come up fiercely from both sides of the embankment,
the gusts in the poplar leaves mingling with the rustle that
was directed against us from up the road. They were missing us
all the time, these unknown soldiers of ours, yet they put a
thousand deaths round about us so close that they were almost
a garment. I didn't dare move.

What a monster that colonel must be, though. I was sure that,
like a dog, he had no idea of death. It struck me at the same
time that there must be lots like him, as gallant as he, in our
army, and as many again, no doubt, on the opposite side. One
wondered how many. A million--or two? Several millions in all,
perhaps. From that moment, my terror became panic. With crea-
tures like that about the place, this hellish idiocy might go on
indefinitely. . . . Why should they stop? Never had I felt the
way of men and things to be so implacable.

Could it be that I was the only coward on earth, I wondered.
The thought was terrifying. Lost in the midst of two million
madmen, all of them heroes, at large and armed to the teeth!
With or without helmets, without horses, on motor bicycles,
screeching, in cars, whistling, sniping, plotting, flying, kneeling,
digging, taking cover, wheeling, detonating, shut in on earth as
in an asylum cell ; intending to wreck everything in it, Germany,
France, the whole world, every breathing thing; destroying, more
ferocious than a pack of mad dogs and adoring their own madness
(which no dog does), a hundred, a thousand times fiercer than
a thousand dogs and so infinitely more vicious! What a mess we
were in! Clearly it seemed to me that I had embarked on a crusade
that was nothing short of an apocalypse.

One is as innocent of Horror as one is of sex. How could I
possibly have guessed this horror when I left the Place Clichy?
Who could have foreseen, before getting really into the war, what
was inside the foul and idle, heroic soul of man? There I was,
caught up into a general rush towards murder for all, towards
fire. ... It was a thing that had come up from the depths and
here it was on top of us.

All this while the colonel never faltered; I watched him receive
little messages from the general, there on the embankment, where
he straightway tore them up after reading them without haste,
amid the bullets. Did none of them contain the order to put an
immediate stop to this frightfulness? Was he not being told by
H.Q. that there was some misunderstanding, some ghastly mistake?
That the cards had been wrongly dealt and something was wrong?
That we were meant to have engaged on manoeuvres, for fun, and
not in this business of killing? Not at all.

"Carry on, Colonel! Go right ahead as you are." That must
be what General Des Entrayes, our Chief of Division, was tell-
ing him in these messages which were brought to him every five
minutes by a runner, who each time looked greener and more
liverish. He could have been my brother in fear, that boy; but
there wasn't the time to fraternize, either.

What, was there nothing wrong then? This shooting at each o-
ther like this without a word,--it was all O.K. It was one of the
things you can do without getting hauled over the coals good
and proper. It was actually accepted, it was probably encouraged
by decent folk, like drawing lots in conscription or getting engaged
or beagling! There was nothing for it. I had suddenly discovered,
all at once, what the war was, the whole war. I'd lost my inno-
cence. You need to be pretty well alone with it face to face,
as I was then, to see the filthy thing properly, in the round.
They'd touched off the war between us and the other side, and now
it was flaring! Like the current between the two carbons in an arc
lamp. And it wasn't going to be put out soon, either. We would
all be going through it, the colonel along with the rest, for all
his fine airs, and his guts would look the same as mine when the
current from opposite flashed through his middle.

There are a lot of ways of being condemned to death. What
wouldn't I have given at that moment to be in gaol instead of
where I was! If only, fool that I was, if only I'd gone and stolen
something, looking ahead when it was still so easy, when there
was still time. One thinks of nothing! You come out of gaol alive,
but not out of a war. That's a fact and everything else hot air.

If only I'd still had the time, but I hadn't it any longer! There
was nothing left to steal. How cosy it would be in a dear little
prison cell, I told myself, where no bullets ever came. No bullets,
ever. I knew of one all ready and warm, facing the sun. In my
mind I could see it, the Saint-Germain it was actually, close to
the woods; I knew it well; I used to pass by it often at one time.
How one changes! I was a kid in those days and the prison used
to frighten me. I didn't yet know what men were like. I shall
never again believe what they say or what they think. It is of
men, and of them only, that one should always be frightened.

How long would the delirium of these monsters need to last
for them to stop in the end, exhausted? How long could a fit
of frenzy like this go on? A few months? A few years? Perhaps
until every one was dead, every one of these madmen. To the
very last of all? Well, since things were taking this desperate
turn, I decided to risk everything at one throw, to try the final,
the supreme move, and on my own, alone, to try and stop the
war! My small section of it, at any rate.

The colonel was walking about, two yards away. I would go
and speak to him. I'd never done that before. Now was the time
to dare to do it, though. Where we were, there was hardly any-
thing further to lose. "What do you want?" I could see him
saying it, very surprised, of course, by my cheek in interrupting
him. Then I should explain it all to him as I saw it. We'd see
what his views on the matter were. The all-important thing in
life is to say what's in your mind. And two heads would be
better than one.

I was about to take this decisive step when, at that very moment,
hurrying along towards us came a dismounted cavalryman (as they
were called in those days), limping, hobbling, with his upturned
helmet in his hand like a blind beggar, and properly spattered
with mud, his face even greener than the company runner's.
He was muttering as if sick at heart or as if he were suffering
the pains of hell, and was trying somehow to struggle up out
of a grave. So here was a ghost who disliked the bullets as
much as I did, eh? Perhaps he could foresee them, like I could.

"What's up?" The colonel savagely stopped him short, glaring
coldly at this apparition. To see this deplorable trooper in such
slovenly undress and shuddering with excitement thoroughly irri-
tated the colonel. Fear was not to the colonel's liking in the least,
one could see that. And then above all, that helmet held in his
hand like a felt hat, when ours was a front-line regiment, a reg-
iment on the attack,--that was the last straw. He looked as if
he were taking off his hat to the war, this cavalryman, as he
walked into it on foot.

Under this stare of disapproval, our uncertain messenger came
to attention, with his little fingers along the seams of his trou-
sers, which is the proper thing to do in such cases. He stood there
on the road, stiff and swaying, with the sweat running down his
throat, and his jaws were working so hard that he uttered little
grunting cries like a puppy dreaming. You couldn't make out
whether he wanted to say something to us or whether he was
crying.

The Germans squatting at the end of the road had just changed
weapons. They were now carrying on their pranks with a machine
gun; it crackled like a lot of big boxes of matches, and infur-
iated bullets swarmed all around us, pricking the air like
wasps.

All the same the man managed at last to get out something
intelligible.

"Quartermaster Sergeant Barousse has been killed, sir," he
said in one gasp.

"Well?"

"He was killed on his way to meet the bread waggon on
the Etrapes road, sir."

"Well?"

"He's been blown up by a shell."

"Well, good God, and what then?"

"Well, that's what it is, sir."

"Is that all?"

"Yes sir, that's all, sir."

"And what about the bread?" asked the colonel.

That was the end of the conversation, because I distinctly
remember that he had time to say, "And what about the bread?"
Then that was all. After that there was only a flash and then
the noise that came with it. But it was the sort of noise that
you never would believe existed. My eyes, ears, nose and mouth
were so full of it suddenly that I really believed it was all
over and that I had been turned into fire and noise myself.

But no, after a while the fire had gone and the noise stayed
a long time in my head, and then my arms and legs were shaking
as if some one from behind me were waggling them. They seemed
to be leaving me but in the end they stayed where they were.
In the smoke which pricked my eyes for a long time the smell
of powder and sulphur was strong enough to kill all the bugs
and fleas in the whole world.

Directly after that, I thought of Quartermaster Sergeant Bar-
ousse who the other fellow had told us had been blown up. That
was good news. So much the better, I thought to myself. "That's
rid the regiment of one more bastard." He'd tried to have me up
for a tin of jam. "Every one has his own war to wage," I said
to myself. Looked at in some ways, there seemed at times to be
some point in the war. I certainly knew of three or four other
swine in our company whom I'd have been very willing to help
find a shell, like Barousse had.

As for the colonel, I had nothing against him. Nevertheless, he
was dead too. I couldn't see where he was at first. He'd been
flung onto the embankment on his side and the explosion had thrown
him into the arms of the despatch bearer, who was dead also.
They were in each other's arms and would continue the embrace
for ever, but the cavalryman hadn't his head any more, only
his neck open at the top with blood bubbling in it like stew in a
pot. The colonel's stomach was slit open and he was making an
ugly face about that. It must have been painful when that happened.
So much the worse for him. If he'd gone away when the firing
began, he wouldn't have had it.

All this heap of flesh was bleeding like the deuce. Shells were
still bursting to right and left of the picture.

I wasn't slow to leave the place after that. I was delighted to
have such a good excuse tp clear out. In fact, I sang a bit as I
walked, tottering slightly as one does after a hard afternoon's
rowing when one's legs are behaving rather funnily. 'Just one
shell ; it doesn't take long for just one shell to do the trick,"
I told myself. "Well, I'm damned!" I kept repeating all the time.
"Well, I'm damned!"

There was nobody left at the end of the road. The Germans
had gone away. But just that once had taught me pretty quick
to keep to the cover of the trees in future. I was in a hurry to
get back to the lines to find out whether any others in our lot
had been killed while out reconnoitering. Besides, I went on,
there must be some pretty smart ways of getting yourself taken
prisoner! . . . Here and there wisps of bitter smoke were wreathed
around the earth clods. "Perhaps they're all dead by now." I
wondered whether they were. "As they're such obstinate fools,
that would be the best and most practical way out, that they
should all have been killed without delay. . . . Then we should
be through with it at once. . . . We'd go off home. We'd go
through the Place Clichy again maybe, in triumph. . . . The two
or three of us who had survived . . . That's what I hoped. Just
a few good fine-looking fellows swinging along with the general
in front. All the others would have been killed. Like the colonel ?
like Barousse, like Vanaille (another sod) and all the rest. . . .
They'd cover us with decorations and flowers and we'd march
through the Arc de Triomphe. We'd walk into a restaurant and
they'd serve us free. We'd never have to pay for anything any
more, never again. 'We're your heroes,' we'd say, when the bill
came, 'the saviours of our country!' And that would be enough.
Little French flags would do for payment. Why, the girl at the
cash desk would refuse to take money from heroes; she'd even
make us a present of some and kiss us as we went past her till.
Life would be worth living."

As I was escaping, I noticed that my arm was bleeding, but
only slightly, from a scratch, not a decent wound. It wouldn't
be enough; I should have to carry on.

It began to rain again and the Flemish fields seemed to dribble
dirty water. For a long time I still hadn't met anybody, only the
wind and a little later on the sun. From time to time, I couldn't
think from where, a bullet would come after me, gaily through
the sunny air, looking for me in all this emptiness, determined to
kill me. Why? Never again, even if I lived to be a hundred, would
I go for a walk in the country. That I promised myself.

As I walked along, I remembered the ceremony that had taken
place the day before. It had been in a meadow on the side of
a hill; the colonel in his loud voice had harangued the regiment:
"Up, boys, and at 'em! And long live France!"

If you've no imagination, dying doesn't matter much; if you
have, it's too much. That's what I think. Never had I under-
stood so many things at once.

The colonel never had had any imagination. All his bad luck
was due to that, and ours especially. Was I then the only one
in our regiment to have any idea what death meant? I preferred
my own taste in death, a leisurely one. ... To come in twenty
years' time, or thirty or maybe longer. Better than the one they
planned for me to have right away, swallowing a full mouthful
of Flanders mud, more than a mouthful, my face split from ear
to ear in one flash. One has surely the right to have an opinion
about one's own death. But where could I go? Straight ahead?
With my back to the enemy? If the M.P.'s were to catch me at
a loose end like that, I should be in for a good time. I should be
given a rough-and-ready trial that very evening in a secondary-
school classroom. There were plenty of empty ones wherever we
went. They would have played at justice with me as one does
when the master is out of the room. The N.C.O.'s would be seated
on the dais, while I stood handcuffed in front of the little desks.
At dawn I should have been shot; a dozen rounds plus one.
What then?

I thought again of the colonel and how fine the fellow looked,
with his cuirass and his helmet and his moustaches. Put him on at
a music hall, walking about among the bullets and shells as I had
seen him, and the turn would have filled the Alhambra those
days. He'd have wiped the floor with Fragson herself, though at
the time I'm speaking of she was tremendously popular. That's
what I was thinking. Down, boys, and leave 'em alone, I thought.

After hours and hours of carefully sneaking forward, at last
I caught sight of our men by a group of farmhouses. It was one
of our advance posts, part of a squadron billeted thereabouts.
Not one of them had been killed, they told me. Everybody alive
and kicking. But it was I who had the big piece of news. "The
colonel's dead!" I yelled to them, as soon as I was within distance.

"There's no shortage of colonels!" Lance Corporal Pistil, who
was on duty, and also on fatigue, snapped back at me.

"And while waiting for the colonel to be replaced, I'll tell you
what you can do, me lad. You get on with fetching the grub,
together with Empouille and Kerdoncuff here. There's a couple of
sacks for each of you, and it's behind the church over there that
you'll find it. . . . And you can see to it you don't get handed
a bag of bloody bones, as you did yesterday. And I'll thank you
to get a move on with it and not come Weedin' in here after night-
fall, you stiffs. . . ."

So off we went again, all three of us.

"I sha'n't ever tell them anything in future," I said to myself.
I was annoyed. There was clearly no point in telling their sort
about such a thing as I'd just seen; one only got bawled at for
one's pains. It was already too long past to be of any interest.
And when you think that a week before I would have had four
columns in the papers, along with my photograph, for announceing
the death of a colonel like that. Just a brainless lot of sods,
that's all!

It was in a cherry orchard dried up by the August sun that
the meat for the whole regiment was being doled out. On sacks
and on tent canvas spread out on the ground and on the grass
itself were pounds and pounds of tripe and whitish-yellow fat
and whole disembowelled sheep in a havoc of entrails which
oozed curious little streams into the surrounding grass. The
carcass of an ox had been cut in two and hung in a tree. The four
butchers of the regiment were still clambering around it, swearing
and tugging at portions of its flesh. There was any amount of
brawling between sections over morsels of rich meat, and kidneys
in particular, amid clouds of those flies which are only seen at
such moments and are as lusty and clamorous as sparrows.

And then, too, there was blood everywhere, softly flowing
through the grass in search of sloping ground. The last pig was
being killed near by. Four men and one of the butchers were
already squabbling over some of the bits to come.

"Damn your eyes, it was you pinched the sirloin yesterday..."

I had time to glance twice at this discussion of food values, as
I leant against a tree, and then I had to give way to an overwhelming
desire to vomit--more than a little, until I fainted.

Well, they took me back to camp on a stretcher, but not without
making good use of the opportunity to rummage through my
two rubber-lined meat sacks.

I awoke into another of Pistil's cursing fits. The war was still
in full swing.




EVERYTHING COMES TO YOU IF YOU WAIT; I WAS MADE LANCE
corporal in my turn, towards the end of that same August. I
often used to be sent with five men on liaison under General Des
Entrayes. This "brass hat" was a slim and silent little man who
didn't strike one at first as either bloodthirsty or heroic. Still,
one couldn't be too sure. ... He seemed to prefer his own comfort
to anything else. He was caring about comfort the whole time,
and although we had been busy retreating for more than a month,
he'd curse right and left if his orderly hadn't found him a clean
bed and an up-to-date kitchen every time he halted for the night.

This worry about his well-being was a very great nuisance to
our brigade major. The general's domestic fussiness aggravated
him. Especially because he himself was sallow, dreadfully gast-
ritic, and constipated; his own food didn't interest him a bit.
Nevertheless, he had to take his boiled eggs at the general's table
and listen the while to his complaints. Either one's a military
man or one isn't. But I can't say I was ever very sorry for him,
because as an officer he was a first-rate swine. For instance.
When we had dragged ourselves and our fodder along uphill
roads all day, we would eventually pull up somewhere or other
so that the general could get to bed. We'd search for a quiet
sheltered village, where there were no troops billeted, and we'd
find it for him, and if the men were there, they moved on quickly
enough; we merely bundled them out and they slept in the
open, even if they had already made up their straw.

The village was commandeered for the General Staff alone,
with its horses, canteens and baggage and this damned major.
This sod's name was Pincon, Major Pincon. I hope he's rotting
by now--and not too comfortably, either. But at the time I'm
speaking of, he was still bloody much alive, was Major Pincon.
He'd parade us runners every evening and bawl us out for a
while, just to smarten us up and put some spirit into us. He'd
curse us all to blazes, we who'd dragged around behind the
general all day. Dismount!--Mount!--As you were, there; dis-
mount again!--And off we'd have to go, carrying his orders
all over the shop. You might just as well have drowned us by
the time it was over. That would have been the easiest thing
for every one concerned.

"Dismiss! Back to your regiments, all of you! And double
to it!" he'd yell.

"Where is the regiment, sir?" we'd ask.

"At Barbagny."

"Where's that, sir?"

"It's over there."

Over there, where he was pointing, there was nothing but the
darkness, which is all there was anywhere, anyway,--a black
darkness eating up the road two feet in front of our face, and
what you could see of the road was about the size of your tongue.
God knew where we were to find his Barbagny in this world's
end! You'd have had to sacrifice at least a whole squadron to
find it. And a squadron of brave men at that. Well, I wasn't a
brave man and I couldn't see at all why I should be; I had
less wish than anybody to find his Barbagny, about which he
was entirely vague himself. It was as if by dint of shouting
at me, they had tried to make me want to go away and commit
suicide. You either get things that way or not.

In all this solid blackness, which you felt would never give you
back your arm, if you stuck it out in front of your face, there
was only one thing that was clear to me, which was--and it at
least was very clear indeed--that the desire to kill was lurking
within it, vast and multiform.

This brute of a brigade major busied himself when evening came
sending us to our death, and often he'd get like that as soon
as the sun set. We used to put up some sort of inert resistance
to him; we were careful not to understand what he meant, and
somehow or other we'd manage to stick close, when we could, to
a comfortable bivvy; but in the end, when there were no longer
any trees in sight, we'd have to give in and do a bit of facing
up to death; the general's dinner would be ready.

Everything, after that moment had come, was a matter of
chance. Sometimes you'd find your regiment and his damned
Barbagny, and sometimes you wouldn't. It was usually by mistake
that you did find it, when the sentinels of the squadron on guard
fired at you as you came up. The result, of course, was that you
explained who you were and nearly always you ended up the night
on some sort of fatigue or other, carrying a lot of sacks of oats
or pails of water and being sworn at until you were dizzy as
well as dropping asleep.

Next morning off we'd go, we runners, the five of us, to report
at General Des Entrayes' quarters and carry on the war.

But most often we wouldn't find the regiment, and then we'd
just wait for daylight while we detoured around villages on
unknown roads, skirting deserted hamlets and sinister-looking
copses. These were to be avoided, because of the German patrols.
Still, you had to be somewhere while you waited for the dawn;
you had to be somewhere or other in the night. You couldn't avoid
it all. Ever since then I've known what rabbits must feel like in
a warren.

It's amusing the way a sense of pity comes to one. If one had
told Major Pincon that he was nothing but a cowardly, murderous
brute, that would have given him the very greatest pleasure, the
pleasure of having us shot out of hand by the Captain of the
M.P.'s, who was about at his heels the whole time and whose
one particular idea was just that. It wasn't the Germans this
policeman was after.

So we had to risk being ambushed night after night in this
idiotic way, with only the hope, each time less and less rea-
sonable, of coming back at last--that and no other hope, except
that if one ever did come back, one would never forget, absolute-
ly never forget, that one had met in this world with a man
made in the likeness of you and me, but far more obscene than
any crocodile or any shark that hangs about ships in West Indian
waters, waiting for the refuse and the rotten meat to be thrown
overboard into his gaping gullet.

The greatest defeat, in anything, is to forget, and above all to
forget what it is that has smashed you, and to let yourself be
smashed without ever realizing how thoroughly devilish men can
be. When our time is up, we people mustn't bear malice, but
neither must we forget: we must tell the whole thing, without
altering one word,--everything that we have seen of man's
viciousness; and then it will be over and time to go. That is
enough of a job for a whole lifetime.

Personally, I should have been glad to throw Major Pincon
to the sharks, and his policeman with him--just to teach them
the proper way to live.

And my horse could have gone too, so that he shouldn't suffer
any more. He hadn't any back left, poor brute, it was so sore;
only two round open wounds where the saddle went, as wide
across as my two hands, raw and running with pus, which streamed
from the edges of his blanket down to his hams. But one had
to ride him all the same, jogging on and on. . . . He sagged as
he trotted along. But horses are much more patient than men are.
He undulated as one rode and had to be left out in the open air.
Inside barns, the stench that came from his wounds was so
strong it was enough to stop one's breath. When one got up on
his back it hurt him so that he arched himself, as gently as he
could, and his belly reached to his knees. It felt like clambering
onto a donkey. That made him more comfortable to ride, I must
admit. We were very tired ourselves, with all that metal we
carried on our heads and shoulders.

General Des Entrayes, in his private quarters, was waiting for
his dinner. The table had been laid, the lamp was in its place.

"Get to hell out of here!" Pincon yelled at us once again, swinging
his lantern in front of our noses. "We're sitting down to table.
I don't want to have to tell you again, d'you hear? Will you get
out, you sods?" he screamed. Pushing us out to rot like this
brought a little colour to his waxen cheeks.

Sometimes before we went, the general's cook would pass us out
a bit of grub. The general had food enough and to spare, as
the regulations allowed him forty rations for himself alone! He
was no longer young, that man. In fact, he must have been about
due for retirement. His knees gave way too, as he walked. Probably
his moustaches were dyed.

As you went out, you could see the veins of his temples in the
lamplight; they meandered about like the Seine at the outskirts
of Paris. He had grown-up daughters, so they said, unmarried
and, like him, badly off. Perhaps it was remembering this
that made him so fussy and so full of grouses, like an old dog
disturbed in its habits, looking everywhere for its basket if
some one will only open the door for it.

He was fond of gardens and roses; wherever we went he never
missed one. There's nobody like a general for being fond of
roses. It's a well-known fact.

Well, we'd get going. What was a job was getting our hacks
to trot. They were afraid to move, anyway, on account of their
sores, and they were afraid of us too, and they were afraid of
the darkness; they were afraid of everything. Yes, hell, and so
were we! We'd go back again and again to ask the major the way
once more. Each time he called us louts and good-for-nothing sons
of bitches. By good use of our spurs we'd at last pass the most
forward outpost and, giving the guards the word, we dived straight
out into the dirty business ahead, into the darkness of No Man's
Land.

After wandering a good while from shadow to shadow, one
would begin to see a bit where one was going, or so it seemed. . . .
As soon as one cloud was a little lighter than another, you told
yourself you had seen something. . . . But in front of you there
was nothing you could be sure of except the echo which came and
went, the echo of the horses' trotting hooves, which made a vast
noise that stifled you, you wanted it so much not to be there.
They seemed to trot aloud to heaven, these horses, to be calling
to everything on earth to come and kill us. And it would be so
easily done, done with one hand, with the rifle propped against
the trunk of a tree. I was always telling myself that the first gleam
one would see would be the rifle-flash that was the end of one.

By the end of those four weeks which the war had lasted, we
had grown so tired, so wretched, that through sheer fatigue I'd
lost a little of my fright by the wayside. The hellishness of being
bullied night and day by these N.C.O.'s, by the lesser ones parti-
cularly, who had become even more brutish, meaner and more odious
than usual, was enough at last to make you a little doubtful,
however obstinate you might be, about going on living.

Oh, how one longed to go away! To get away and sleep! That,
first of all. And if there's really no longer any way to go off
and sleep, then the wish to live just disappears. So long as you
were still about there, alive, there was nothing for it but to
look as if you were hunting for your regiment.

A lot of things, a lot of very cruel things, have got to happen
to a fool before his mind can change its thoughts. What had made
me think for the first time in my life, really think hard, and
get ideas that were of some use and my very own, was assuredly
that damned inquisitor of a Major Pincon. I thought about him
as hard as I could, as I bobbed along, all dressed up and loaded
with junk, taking my part in this unbelievable international
rumpus, which I had joined with such enthusiasm. ... I admit
that.

Every yard of darkness ahead of us was a further promise
of an end to it all, a promise of death--but what sort of death?
The only uncertain thing in the whole business was what uniform
one's executioner would wear. Would it be one of ours? Or one
from the other side?

I'd never done anything to Pincon! No more to him than to
the Germans, I hadn't. He, with a head like a rotten fish, and his
four stripes glittering all over him, from his neck to his navel,
with his bristling moustache and sharp, bony knees, and the field
glasses hanging around his neck like a cowbell, and his army
ordnance map. I'd ask myself what raving desire possessed him
to get every one else killed. Every one else who hadn't an ordnance
map.

We four horsemen on the road made as much noise as a couple
of platoons. You must have been able to hear us coming four
miles away--or perhaps no one wanted to. That was possible, of
course. Perhaps the Germans were frightened of us: who knows?

On each eyelid we were carrying a month of sleep, and as much
again in the back of our heads, as well as our pounds of iron and
steel.

My riders weren't much good at expressing themselves. They
hardly talked at all, as a matter of fact. They were lads who
had come from the further end of Brittany to join up, and what
they knew they'd not learnt at school but in the ranks. That
particular evening I'd tried to talk a bit about this village of
Barbagny with the one who was next to me, whose name was
Kersuzon.

"Listen, Kersuzon," I said to him. "We're in the Ardennes
country here, you know. . . . Can you see anything ahead of us?
I can't see anything at all."

"It's as black as your bottom," Kersuzon told me. Nothing
more.

"Say, listen, haven't you heard any one mention Barbagny
during the course of to-day? Or say where it was?" I asked him.

"No."

So there we were.

We never found Barbagny. We turned back at last, towards
morning, towards another village where the man with the field
glasses was waiting for us. His chief was taking his early morn-
ing coffee on the terrace outside the mayor's house when we
arrived.

"What a fine thing Youth is, Pincon!" the old man remarked
in a loud voice to his brigade major as we went by. After which
he got up and went off to pee, and then came and walked about
with his hands behind his back, a little bent. The general was
very tired that morning, his orderly whispered to me; he'd slept
badly. There was something wrong with his bladder which bothered
him, so one heard.

Kersuzon always answered me in the same way when I asked him
something at night; I came to be amused by the oddity of it.
He told me two or three times more that it was as black as your
bottom, and then he died; killed, quite soon after that, on leav-
ing a village which, I remember quite well, we mistook for another,
by some Frenchmen who mistook us for somebody else.

It was only a few days after Kersuzon's death that we thought
out a way of not getting lost at night any more. We were very
pleased with this idea of ours.

They'd be chivvying us out of camp, you see. All right, we'd
not say a single word. We wouldn't try to scheme off any more.
"Get out of here!" he'd yell, as usual, in his rasping voice.
"Very good, sir."

And off we'd go at once, the five of us, in the direction of
the firing. We might have been going blackberrying. It was fine
country, full of little valleys, in that direction: Meuse coun-
try with its hills, and vines on them, the grapes not yet ripe,
and autumn, and villages built of wood, which had got very dry
in three months of summer, so that they burned beautifully.
We'd noticed this one night when we hadn't any idea where
to go. There was always a village burning where the firing was.
You didn't go very close to it, not too close; you just watched
it from a distance, say from six or seven miles away, as a
spectator. And every evening after that, about this time, a
lot of villages caught fire; one after another, all around one,
like the flares of some absurd fair ground, which has the
whole of the countryside, they'd burn away in front of one and
on each side, with the flames rising up from them, licking the
clouds.

You could see everything disappearing in the blaze, churches,
farms and haystacks, which burnt with brighter and taller
flames than anything else, and girders which reared straight up,
flickering in the darkness, and then crashed down into the
brightness of the fire.

You can see very clearly how a village burns, even a dozen
miles away. A pretty sight. You've no idea what a fine effect
even the most insignificant little hamlet, which you wouldn't
even notice in the daytime, in the dullest country, will make
at night when it's burning. You'd think it was Notre Dame! A
village takes all night to burn, even a small one; it looks like
a great big flower of flame, then a bud, then nothing is left.
It smokes for a while, and then morning comes.

The horses we left saddled in the field close to where we were,
and they never moved. We went off and dozed in the grass,
except one of us, of course, who took his turn on guard. But
when there's a fire to watch, the night passes much more easily;
its no longer a wretched thing to get through, it's not so lonely
any more.

Unfortunately the villages didn't last long. ... By the end
of the month there were none left in the district. The woods
were shelled, too, but they didn't last out a week. Woods burn
beautifully, but they're over in no time.

After that all the roads were filled by artillery columns going
one way and refugees going the other. As for us, in fact, we
could no longer either go or come; we had to stay where we
were.

Every one queued up to go and get killed. Even the general
couldn't find any place that wasn't full of soldiers. In the end
we all slept out in the fields, whether we were generals or
privates. Those who still had a little courage left lost even that.
It was from that month on that they began to shoot troopers
by squads, so as to improve their morale, and the M.P. began
to be mentioned in despatches for the way in which he was
waging his own little war, the really genuine war, the most des-
perate of all




WE WERE GIVEN A REST AND THEN, A FEW WEEKS LATER, WE GOT
ON our horses and started out north again. The cold went with us.
And the guns never left us, either. Still, we never met the Germans
except by chance, sometimes a hussar, sometimes a section out
sniping; one ran into them here and there, wearing yellow and
green, pretty colours. We looked as if we were trying to find
them, but we moved on somewhere else as soon as they came
in sight. Each time we met, two or three troopers were left
behind, sometimes their fellows, sometimes ours. Their riderless
horses would gallop free and come dashing towards us from a
long way off, with stirrups clattering loose from those saddles
of theirs, with their odd canties made of leather as bright as a
new pocketbook. They were coming to join our horses, whom
they recognised as their friends at once. Well, they were lucky.
We couldn't have done the same.

One morning, as we came in from reconnaissance, Lieutenant
Sainte-Engence was protesting in the midst of a group of officers
that what he had just told them was quite true. "I killed two of
them!" he insisted, and he held out his sabre for them to see.
There was indeed some dried blood on it, which filled the little
groove made for that purpose.

"He was great. I wish you could have seen him!" Captain
Ortolan bore him out. "How he went for them! Well done,
Sainte-Engence!" It had all happened in Ortolan's squadron.

"I missed none of it. I was right behind him. Lunge forward and
right! Zip! Over goes the first of them! Then the point into the
other's chest--on the left this time. Cross and thrust! Why, it
was good enough for Bertrand's! Well done again, Sainte-Engence!
Two lancers they were--less than a mile from where we're
standing. They're lying out there now, in a ploughed field. No
more war for those two, eh, Sainte-Engence? What a wonderful
double thrust! They went over like rabbits. . . ."

The lieutenant accepted the compliments and congratulations
of his fellow officers with modesty. His mare had already
galloped a long way, but now that Ortolan was bearing witness
to his exploit, all was well and he rode off and circled slowly
around the assembled squadron, as if he'd just finished a point-
to-point, before bringing her back to be rubbed down.

"We ought to send out another reconnoitring party to the
same spot right away," said Captain Ortolan in great excitement.
"Those two sods must have come this way and got lost, but
there are probably others behind them. . . . Hey, you, Bardamu,
you go off after them with your four fellows!"

It was to me the captain was speaking.

"And when they open fire, mark them carefully and come back at
once and tell me where they are. They're probably Brandenburgers,
I should say. . .

According to the regulars, Captain Ortolan was practically
never to be seen about barracks in peace time. But now, with a
war on, he bobbed up all over the shop. Nothing was too much
for him, certainly. The energy with which he devoted himself
to duty, even with so many other crazy fools about the place,
was every day more and more astonishing. He took cocaine,
too, so they said. Pale, hollow-eyed and shaky, his feeble legs
gave under him when he got off his horse, but he'd pull himself
together at once and scramble angrily up every slope in search
of some danger to defy. For two pins he'd have sent us to fetch
a light from the mouths of the German guns. He aided and
abetted death as much as he could. One would have sworn that
Captain Ortolan and Death had entered into a contract together.

He had spent the first part of his life, so I learned, competing
at horse shows and breaking a rib or two half a dozen times a year.
He'd also broken his legs so often and used them so little for
walking that now they had no calves left. He went about taking
jerky, sharp steps, as if on stilts. Seeing him in his enormous
cloak, huddled in the rain, you'd have taken him for the phantom
quarters of a race horse.

It should be explained that at the outset of this horror to
which we were condemned, that is to say in August, and even
into September, there were still certain times, sometimes whole
days, and certain corners of a road or a wood, that were bearable
to us. ... You could imagine that things were almost all right;
you might be able, say, to get through a tin of fruit with your
bread and not be too harassed by a presentiment that it would
be your last. But by October there was an end to such little lulls,
the hail got thicker and heavier, more spiced, more stuffed with
bullets and shells. Soon the storm would be in full force and then
the thing you were trying not to see would be plain in front of
your eyes and there'd be nothing you could see besides that:
your own death.

The nighttime, which one had been so frightened of at first,
had now become almost sweet by comparison. We came at last
to look forward to it, to long for the night. They couldn't shoot
at us as easily at night as by day. And that was the only difference
that mattered.

It's difficult to get at the essential truth at the bottom of any-
thing, and even in the case of war imagination dies hard.

But a cat will eventually take to water rather than face being
burnt in a fire.

Now and again at night one could snatch an odd quarter of
an hour which was a little like the lovely times of peace, that
now incredible time when everything was calm and pleasant,
when nothing really mattered, when you could do so many things
that now seemed marvellously, amazingly delightful. Peace time
had been Paradise. . . .

But soon the nights too were made merciless. Almost always
you had to force your weariness to work a little and suffer a
little bit more, merely so as to be able to eat or to snatch forty
winks in the darkness. The food supply was dragged to the front
line heavily and laboriously in long limping lines of quaking
waggons, full of meat and prisoners and wounded, oats, rice,
M.P.'s and wine. The wine came in those great quivering, fat-
bellied demijohns, which make one think at once of good times
past.

Behind the smithy and the bread, men dragged themselves
along on foot, prisoners of our own lot and their fellows too,
handcuffed, condemned to this penalty and that penalty, tied
by the wrist to the stirrup of an M.P., some of them to be shot
next morning but no sadder-looking than the rest. They too ate
their ration of that tunny fish which is so difficult to digest
(they wouldn't have time to digest it, anyway) while they waited
on the side of the road for the waggon train to get under way once
more; and they ate their bread too with a civilian chained to
them, who they said was a spy but who wasn't aware of it. And
neither were we.

Then the horror continued in its night guise, and you felt your
way along twisting little lanes in blank, pitch-dark villages,
staggering under a sack heavier than a man, from one unknown
barn to another, shouted at, threatened, haggard and without
hope of any end to it all other than in slush amid oaths and in
disgust at having been tortured and duped to death by a horde
of vicious madmen, who had suddenly become incapable of
doing anything else as long as they lived, but kill and be slit
in half without knowing the reason why.

One would sink to the ground between two stacks of manure
when they had yelled at one and kicked one enough, only soon
to be heaved onto one's feet again and sent off to load up some
other waggon train somewhere else.

The village would overflow with food and men in a night,
oozing fat, apples, oats and sugar, which you had to cart about
and distribute wherever you might find a squad of men. The
supply waggons brought every mortal thing with them, except
escape.

The fatigue would flop down exhausted around the cart and
then along would come the commissariat officer with his lantern
lighting up these corpses. He was an ape of a man with two chins,
and he had to find a watering place for the horses, no matter
how great the chaos was. Water for the horses! But I have seen
four of them, four of the men, fall fast asleep, fainting with
sleep, in the water, body and all in it, up to the neck.

After finding a watering place, you had to find the farm and
the track you'd come along, where you thought you'd left your
squad. If you didn't find it, you were free to sink down for
an hour by the side of a wall, if there was still an hour left.
In this suicide business you mustn't make difficulties, you've
just got to pretend that life's going on as usual: that's the
hardest part about it all, that damn lie.

Then the waggons went off back behind the lines. Before dawn
they went their way, screeching on every twisted wheel, and
carrying with them a prayer of mine that they'd be surprised
and smashed to bits, burnt to the ground that very day, like
you see in war pictures, the supply train destroyed, wiped out
for ever with all its hideous policemen and horseshoes and
lantern-swinging regulars and all its sacks of lentils and flour;
I longed never to see any of them again. Because one may go
under through unbearable fatigue or any other way, but the bloodiest
way of all is to die carrying sacks into the depths of the night.

The day those swine and their waggons were smashed to splinters
they'd leave us alone, I thought, even if it was only for one
whole night, and then at least one would get a complete night's
rest for body and soul.

This revictualling was one more added nightmare, a nagging
little demon, a parasite on the greater fiend of war. Brute beasts
to the fore, on each flank, to the rear: they were everywhere.
And we who were condemned to a deferred death, we could not
be rid of our overwhelming desire to sleep, and everything
besides that had become a misery, including the effort of eating
and the time it took. A stream or a wall one would seem to
recognize . . . and one traced one's way back to one's squad
by smell, as if one had become a dog again at night in those
deserted villages in war time. The odour of excrement was the
best guide of all.

The chief commissariat officer, keeper of the hatred of the
whole regiment, was for the time being lord of creation. You're
a rogue if you talk of the future; it's the present that counts. To
invoke posterity is to declaim to an audience of maggots. At
night in those war villages, the adjutant herded his human cattle
in readiness for the great slaughterhouses that had just been
opened. The adjutant was king! The King of Death! Adjutant
Cretelle! Just so. Nobody was stronger than he--and no one was
even as strong as he was, except some adjutant of theirs on the
other side.

There was nothing left alive in the village, bar a few frightened
cats. The furniture had been smashed and used for firewood--
chairs, sofas, sideboards, large or small. And everything that
could be carried on one's back, the fellows took away with them:
combs, lamps, cups, worthless little knick-knacks and even bridal
wreaths,--everything went the same way. As if there were
years yet to live. They swiped these things for something to do,
so as to feel there was lots of time left--which is always man's
desire.

The guns meant nothing to them but noise. That's why wars
can go on. Even those who fight in them, while they're fighting
in them, can't realize what war is. With a bullet in their bellies,
they would still have gone on picking up old soles on the road,
which might still "come in handy." A sheep dying on its side
in a field will go on browsing in its death agony. Most people
don't die till the very last moment: but some start to die twenty
years before their time, and sometimes earlier. They are the
unhappy ones of this world.

I wasn't very wise myself but I'd grown sensible enough to
be definitely a coward forever. Due no doubt to this resolve, I
gave an impression of great calm. At all events, coward as I
was, I inspired a strange confidence in our own Captain Ortolan,
who decided to entrust me that very night with a delicate mission.
He took me aside and told me that I was to trot off before
daylight to Noirceur-sur-la-Lys, the weavers' town, fourteen
kilometres from the village where our camp was. My job was to
find out on the spot itself whether the enemy were there or not.
On this point no two runners had been able to agree since morning.
General des Entrayes was impatient to know for certain. I was
allowed, when I set out on this reconnaissance, to choose myself
a horse from among the least badly maimed in the platoon. It
was ages since I'd been alone. I felt as if I were going off on a
journey; but it was a false sense of relief.

As soon as I had started out, I was so tired that, try as I might,
I couldn't properly imagine, precisely enough and in detail, what
my death would be. I went forward from tree to tree, in the
midst of my own clatter of steel. My fine sword alone was as
good as a piano for noise. Maybe I was to be pitied; most
certainly I was absurd.

What was General des Entrayes thinking of to send me out like
this into such a silence, and me all dressed up in cymbals?
For certain it wasn't me he was thinking of.

The Aztecs, so I've heard, used to disembowel eight thousand
believers a week in their Temples of the Sun, as a sacrifice to
the God of the Clouds so that he would send them rain. It's one
of those things that must be hard to believe until you've gone to
a war. But once you're there, everything is understandable and
the Aztecs' unconcern for other men's bodies is the same as the
said General Celadon des Entrayes must have felt for my humble
insides; for he had risen in rank until he himself had become a
sort of exact god, a kind of horrible, merciless little sun.

There was only one little hope I had left--that I might be
taken prisoner. It was not much of a hope, a bare thread. Just
a thread in the night. Because circumstances would not make
polite overtures at all easy. At such moments a rifle shoots you
quicker than a man can raise his hat. Besides, what should I
find to say to a German soldier, an adversary anyway, and one
who had come half across Europe on purpose to kill me? If he
hesitated for one second (which would be all I needed) what
should I say to him? What might he be himself in the first
place--a shop assistant? A professional man called up again?
A gravedigger, perhaps, in civil life--or a cook? Horses are
lucky. They go through the war, like us, but they're not asked
to approve of it or to seem to believe in it. In this business they
were unfortunate but free. Enthusiasm, alas, was our dirty prero-
gative, reserved for us!

I could see the road clearly just then and by the side of it,
rising out of the slush, the square masses of houses with white-
washed walls shining like the moon, like great uneven blocks of
ice, silent and colourless. Was this the end of everything? How long
should I stay in this wilderness before I was done for, before it
was all over? And in what ditch? By which of these walls? Would
they finish me off, I wondered--with a knife, perhaps? Sometimes
they cut off one's hands, one's eyes, and the rest. . . . One
heard of all sorts of things, far from pleasant things. God knows!
One step of my horse . . . and another . . . would that be
enough? These brutes trot like two men in steel boots tied
together, at an absurd uneven double.

My heart behind my ribs crouched like a rabbit, warm, trembling,
stupefied. That's very much what one must feel when one jumps
off the Eiffel Tower--wishing one could stop oneself in space.

The village ahead kept its threat for me secret--but not entirely
secret. In the middle of the square a trickle of water in
the fountain babbled for me alone.

Everything was mine that evening; it all belonged only to
me. I had the moon to myself and the village and a tremendous
sense of fear. I was going to start to trot again. Noirceur-sur-la-
Lys was still, I supposed, at least one hour's ride away, when I
saw a well-muffled light above a door. I went straight towards
the light and so discovered in myself a sort of bravery, a deserter's
bravery it's true, but unsuspected all the same. The light went
out at once, but I had seen it. I banged at the door. I went on
banging and I shouted out in a very loud voice, half in German,
half in French, ready for either or any emergency, calling out to
these wraiths barricaded in the darkness. The door at last opened,
one of its leaves ajar.

"Who are you ?" said a voice. I was saved.

"I'm a dragoon."

"A Frenchman?" I could just see the woman who was speaking.

"Yes, French."

"Only German dragoons have just passed this way. . . . They
also spoke French. . . ."

"Yes, but I really am French."

"Oh."

She seemed to doubt it.

"Where are they now?" I asked.

"They went off towards Noirceur about eight o'clock." She
pointed north.

A girl in a shawl and a white apron came out of the shadow,
almost to the door.

"What did the Germans do to you?" I asked her.

"They burned a house near the Town Hall and here they killed
my little brother . . . with a lance. He was playing on
the bridge, watching them as they went by. Look," she said,
pointing again, "there he is."

She wasn't crying. She relit the candle which first had attracted
my attention, and there sure enough at the back, was the
child's corpse on a mattress. He was dressed in a sailor suit and
his face and neck showed as white as the flame of the candle
above his large square blue collar. He was rolled up on himself,
his arms, legs and back huddled together. The lance had passed,
like an axis of death, through the middle of his stomach. His
mother was crying on her knees by his side, and so was the
father. Then all began to moan at the same time. But I was
very thirsty.

"You haven't a bottle of wine you could sell me, have you?"
I asked.

"Ask Mother. She may know if there's any left. The Germans
took a lot of it just now."

The two women began to argue together about it in low tones.
"There's none left," the daughter said, turning back to me at
the door. "The Germans took it all. Although we had given
them a lot on our own already."

"Oh, yes, they drank a lot of it," the mother said, and stopped
crying suddenly. "They love drinking. . . ."

"A hundred bottles or more, I should say," added the father,
still on his knees.

"Isn't there a single bottle left then?" I went on, still hoping
there might be, I was so terribly thirsty. Above all, I wanted
white wine, that good bitter kind that wakes one up a little.
"I'll pay for it. . . ."

"There's only the very best. It's worth five francs a bottle,"
the women then admitted.

"All right," I said, and I took five francs from my pocket, a
large five-franc piece.

"Go and get one," she told the sister quietly.

The girl took the candle and came back a moment later with
a litre bottle from the cellar.

I'd had what I wanted and I could go.

"Are they coming back?" I asked, becoming anxious once
more.

"Perhaps," they all answered together. "If they do, they'll
set fire to everything. They said so when they went."

"I'll go and have a look."

"You're a brave fellow. . . .That's your road." The father
pointed in the direction of Noirceur. He even came out into
the road to watch me go. The girl and her mother stayed timidly
to watch beside the little body.

"Come back," they called out from inside. "Come in, Joseph;
there's no need to go out on to the road.'

"You're a brave chap," the old man said again, shaking me
by the hand. I set off towards the north, at a trot.

"Don't tell them we're still here, anyway." The girl had come
out again to shout that after me.

"They'll see for themselves to-morrow whether you're there
or not," I answered. I was angry at having parted with my five
francs, The five francs were between them and me. Five francs
are enough to make one hate a person, to make one wish them
all in hell. There's no love to be lost in this world as long
as there are five francs left in it.

"To-morrow," they murmured doubtfully.

For them too to-morrow was a long way off; it didn't make
much sense, a to-morrow like that. Really the thing for all of
us was to get through another hour; one more hour, in a world
in which everything has been reduced in scale by murder, is
miraculous enough.

It was not very long after that. I trotted along from tree to
tree, expecting to be challenged or shot any moment. And that
was all. . . .

It must have been nearly two hours after midnight, not more,
when I came to the crest of a little incline, at a walking pace.
From there I suddenly saw below me row upon row of shining gas-
lights and in the foreground a railway station all lit up, with
its coaches and buffet. But no sound, no noise at all, came from
it. Streets and broad walks and street lamps and still further
parallel rows of lights, block after block, and round and about
all this nothing but the empty eager darkness circling the town,
which lay stretched out before me as if it had been lost in the
night, spread out full of bright light plumb in the middle of
the darkness. I got down off my horse and sat on a hummock for
some little time, and looked at it.

All the same, that didn't tell me whether or not the Germans
had been in Noirceur. But as I knew that normally in such
cases they set fire to a place, if they'd been here and hadn't
burned the town at once, it must mean that they had some unusual
plan in mind. No guns either. It was very odd.

My horse wanted to lie down too. He tugged at his bridle and
that made me turn around. When I looked back, something had
altered in the appearance of the mound in front of me--nothing
much, it's true, but enough to make me call out, "Hey! Who goes
there?" A few feet away the shadows had shifted. . . . There
must be somebody there.

"Don't shout so loud!" A very French voice answered me,
a man's voice, heavy and thick. "You on your own too?" he
asked. I could see him now. He was an infantryman with the
peak of his cap cracked and jauntily worn. After all these years
I can still remember his silhouette perfectly clearly as he came
out from the grass like a dummy target in a wood.

We went closer to each other. I had my revolver in my hand.

I might have shot, any minute, without knowing why.

"Listen," he said, "have you seen them?"

"No, but I've come here to see them."

"145th Dragoons?"

"Yes, and you?"

"I'm a reservist."

"Oh," I said. I was surprised to hear that--a reservist! He
was the first reservist I had met in the war. We'd always mixed
with real army fellows. I couldn't see his face but his voice was
different from the voices of our lot, sadder somehow and so more
decent. For that reason I couldn't help having a certain confidence
in him. It was something, after all.

"I've had enough," he said. "I'm going to get myself nabbed
by the Boche."

That was pretty frank.

"How're you going to do it?"

I was suddenly very interested, very interested indeed, to know
how he was going to carry out his plan and get taken prisoner.

"Dunno yet."

"How did you get this far, anyway? It's not easy to get
yourself pinched."

"I don't give a damn, I'll go and give myself up."

"Aren't you frightened?"

"I'm frightened, all right. But I think it's all bloody stupid,
if you ask me; I don't care a curse about the Germans, anyway.
They never did anything to me. . . ."

"Shut up," I told him; "maybe they can hear us. . . ."

I felt somehow I ought to be polite to the Germans. I should
have liked this reservist to tell me, while he was about it, why
I too was too frightened to be in this war with every one else.
But he didn't tell me anything at all; he simply said he was
through. Then he told me about how his regiment had been scattered
the night before, towards dawn. Our dismounted cavalry pickets
had fired on his company by mistake, across country. They
hadn't been expected just then. They'd arrived three hours before
time. So the other fellows, who were tired and taken by surprise,
had shot them up. I knew that turn well enough myself; I'd met
with it before now.

"And I took advantage of it, I can tell you," he went on.

"'Robinson,' I said to myself--Robinson's my name. Leon Robinson.?
'It's now or never,' I said to myself. Wasn't I right? So
I went off along by a copse and there, suddenly, I came across
the captain. ... He was leaning against a tree, smashed to
bits. . . . Dying he was. ... He was holding himself and spitting.
. . . There was blood all over him and his eyes rolled. ... No
one about. He'd certainly got his. 'Mother, Mother!' he whim-
pered and he was pissing blood. 'Stop that!' I said to him. 'Mother!
what the hell!' Just like that, as I passed him, out of the corner
of my mouth. That must have bucked him up, the sod. Eh?
One can't often say what one thinks to a captain. Take the
chance when it comes. It's not often. . . . And so as to get out
quicker, I dropped my haversack and rifle and everything. . . .
Threw them into a duck pond that was near. ... You see, myself,
as I stand here, I don't want to kill any one; I've never
learnt. ... I never liked a row, even in peace time. I used to
go away. ... So you can imagine ... As a civvy I used to try to
go to work regularly. ... I was an engraver for a time, but I
didn't like that because there were always quarrels. ... I preferred
selling papers in the evening in a quiet quarter where I was
known, near the Bank of France. . . . Place des Victoires, as a
matter of fact. . . . Rue des Petits-Champs--that was my pitch.
I never went beyond the Rue du Louvre and the Palais-Royal on
one side, if you know where I mean. . . . In the morning I'd do
an errand or two for the tradespeople. ... A delivery in the af-
ternoon from time to time. I did every sort of job ... a handy
man. I've been a mechanic. . . . But I don't want a rifle! What
if the Germans see you with a rifle? It's all up with you. But if
you're in fancy things like I am now--with nothing in your
hands and nothing in your pockets. . . . They feel they won't
have so much trouble taking you prisoner, don't they? They
know what it's all about. ... If one could get over to the
Germans without anything on, now, that would be better still.
Like a horse can! Then they wouldn't know what army you
belonged to, would they?"

"That's true," I said.

I realized that being older in years helps when it comes to
thinking. It makes you practical.

"Is that where they are, eh?" We discussed and estimated our
chances together and gazed at the great lighted expanse of the
silent town as if into a crystal, trying to discover what the
future held in store for us.

"Shall we go?"

First we had to cross the railway lines. If there were sentries,
we'd be seen. Or perhaps we mightn't. We'd have to find out. And
go over or underneath through the tunnel.

"We've got to hurry," said this Robinson.

"You've got to do this sort of thing at night: in the daytime
people are less friendly; everybody plays to the gallery more.
The daytime, even in war, is not so honest. You taking your
horse with you?" I took the horse. So as to be able to bolt
quicker, if we weren't well received. We came to the level
crossing, with its raised red-and-white arms. I'd never seen
one like it before. They were different round about Paris.

"D'you think they're in the town already?"

"Sure," he said. "Come on!"

And now we had to be as brave as truly brave men, because
of the horse which followed us calmly, as if it were pushing us
before it with the noise it was making. You could hear nothing
else--clatter! clash! went its hooves. It crashed and echoed
heavily, as if nothing was wrong.

Did this Robinson think the darkness would get us out of this?
We walked in the middle of the empty street, the two of us,
openly, striding along as if it were a parade ground.

Robinson was right. The daytime was without pity, from earth
to sky. Walking along as we were on the road, we must have
looked pretty harmless and simple, both of us, as if we were
returning to barracks after leave. "Have you heard that the
1st Hussars were taken prisoner, the whole lot of them, at Lille?
They marched in, I've heard, suspecting nothing, with the colonel
in front and all. In a main street, my boy! And it shut up on
them. Huns in front and behind--everywhere! At the windows,
all over the shop. That was that. Like rats in a trap, just like
rats! What a bit of luck."

"Damn them."

"God, yes, I should say so." We couldn't get over the beautiful
finality, the neatness of that capture. ... It made our mouths
water. The shops all had their shutters down, all the houses were
shut too, with their little gardens in front, all neat and nice.
But past the post office there was one house, whiter than the
others, shining with lights burning in every window, upstairs
as well as on the ground floor. We rang the bell, taking our
horse with us. A thick, bearded man opened the door. "I'm the
Mayor of Noirceur," he announced at once, though no one had
asked him, "and I'm expecting the Germans." And he came out
into the moonlight to have a look at us. When he saw that we
weren't Germans but still French, he wasn't so solemn--merely
friendly. But he was rather annoyed too. Obviously he wasn't
expecting to see us; we rather upset his arrangements, muddling
his plan. The Germans were to have arrived in Noirceur that
night and he'd arranged everything with the Prefect of Police;
their colonel to be put there, their Red Cross here, and so on.
What if they didn't come now? With us there? That would
surely mean a lot of trouble! There'd be complications, for
certain. He did not say so in so many words, but you could see
he was thinking it.

So he began to talk to us of the common good, standing there
in the night, lost in the silence as we were. The common good,
that's what. . . . The material interests of the community. . . .
The artistic patrimony of Noirceur, which was his trust, a sacred
trust if ever there was one. ... He told us particularly about the
fifteenth-century church. What if they burnt the fifteenth-century
church, eh? As they had the church of Conde-sur-Yser near by?
Just because they were annoyed . . . because it put them out to
find us there. He made us realize what a great responsibilty we
were shouldering. . . . Unthinking young poilus, that's what we
were. . . . The Germans weren't at all fond of tiresome towns
with enemy soldiers still hanging about. . . . Any one could
tell you as much.

While he talked to us like this, sotto voce, his wife and daughters,
two buxom delectable blondes, agreed heartily with what he
said, chipping in from time to time. ... We were being turned
away, in fact. All about us floated the sentimental and archeological
values of Noirceur, become suddenly very powerful, since
there was no longer any one in Noirceur to oppose them. . . .
Patriotic, ethical ghosts they were, wafted this way and that by
his words; the mayor tried to tie them down but they vanished,
dispersed by our fear and our selfishness--and by plain and
simple facts.

It was touching to see him trying his level best to make us
see that duty called us away quick as hell from his town of
Noirceur. He was less brutal, of course, but just as determined
in his way as our own Major Pincon.

Certainly there was nothing we could put against all this show
of strength except our own puny little wish not to die and not to
burn. It was little enough, especially as such things cannot be
said in war time. So we turned back to our empty streets. Every
one I had met that night had opened his heart to me.

"Just my luck!" said Robinson, as we went off. "Why, if only
you'd been a German, you're a decent fellow and you'd have
taken me prisoner, and it would have been all over and done
with. It's a hard job trying to get rid of oneself in a war!"

"What about you?" I said to him. "If you'd been a German,
wouldn't you have taken me prisoner just as much? You might
have had their military medal for it. I wonder what they call
their medal. It must have a devil of a name in German."

As we couldn't find any one on our way who would have anything
to do with taking us prisoners, eventually we went and sat
down on a bench in a little square and there we ate the tin of
tunny fish which Private Robinson had been carrying about and
warming in his pocket all day. Far away you could hear the
guns now--but they were really very far away. If only the two
sides could have stayed where they were, leaving us alone where
we were!

After that, we wandered along a wharf and there, near the
half-unloaded barges, we pissed long into the water. We led the
horse all the time by the bridle, following behind us like an
enormous dog, but near the bridge, in the pastor's single-roomed
house there was a dead man stretched out on a mattress,--a
Frenchman. As a matter of fact, he looked rather like Robinson.

"Isn't he ugly?" said Robinson. "1 don't like dead men. . . ."

"The odd thing about it," I said, "is that he's a bit like you.
He's got a long nose like yours and you're not much older than
he is."

"It's because one's so tired; of course, we all look rather
alike. But you should have seen me in the old days. . . . When I
used to go for long rides on my bike every Sunday. I wasn't a
bad-looking chap. Fine calf muscles I had, I can tell you. . . .
Sport's the thing, you know. And it develops your thighs too. . .

We went outside. The match we'd lit to see him by had gone
out.

"Look, it's too late; you see, it's too late!"

Far away, a long grey and green streak showed already along
the crest of the hill outside the town in the darkness. Dawn! One
more dawn. One less. We'd have to try to get through it and
through all the others which ringed us round more and more
narrowly, like circles of falling and bursting shells.

"Listen, will you be coming along this way again to-morrow
night?" he asked me as we parted.

"There's no tomorrow night, man. D'you think you're a
general?"

"I don't think anything at all, I tell you," he said, turning
away. "Nothing at all, d'you hear me? I only think of not
dying, that's all. And it's enough. What I say to myself is that
every day gained is one more day."

"You're right. Good-bye, fellow, and good luck."

"Good luck to you too. Maybe we'll be meeting again sometime!"

Each of us returned to his own war. And things happened, a
whole host of things went on happening, which it isn't easy to talk
about now, because nowadays people wouldn't understand them
any more.




IF ONE WANTED TO BE RESPECTED AND DECENTLY TREATED,
THERE was no time to be lost in hitting it off with the civilians,
because as the war went on they became rapidly more unpleasant.
As soon as I got back to Paris, I realized this. The women were
in heat and the old men had greed written all over them; nothing
was safe from their rummaging fingers, either persons or pockets.

Back at home they'd been pretty quick to pick up honour and
glory from the boys at the front, and had learnt how to resign
themselves to it all bravely and without flinching.

The mothers, all nurses or martyrs, were never without their
sombre livery and the little diplomas so promptly presented
to them by the War Office. The machine was getting smoothly
to work, in fact.

It's just the same at a nicely run funeral. One's very sad there
too, but one thinks of the will, and of next holidays, of the at-
tractive widow (who's good value, so they say) and, by contrast,
of going on living oneself quite a time yet, of never dying at
all perhaps . . . who knows?

As you follow the bier everybody solemnly takes his hat off
to you. That's nice. It's the time to behave very properly, and
look respectable, and not to make jokes out loud, to be only
inwardly happy. That's allowed. Everything's allowed inside
oneself.

In war time, instead of dancing upstairs, one danced in the
cellar. The men on leave put up with that; they even liked it.
In fact, they insisted on it as soon as they came back and nobody
thought it unseemly. The only thing that's really unseemly is
bravado. Would you be physically brave? Then ask the maggot
to be brave too; he's as pink and pale and soft as you are.

There was nothing for me to complain of. I was winning my
freedom with the military medal I'd been given, and my wound
and all. They'd brought the medal to me in hospital, when
I was convalescing. The same day I left the hospital and went
to a theatre, to show it off to the civvies in the interval. It
was a great success. Medals were a novelty in Paris at the time.
There was quite a to-do.

It was on this same occasion in the foyer of the Opera Comique
that I met my little American Lola, and it was due to her that
I had my eyes opened completely.

There are certain days which count in that way, after months
and months which don't mean a thing. That day of the medal
at the Opera Comique was for me all-important.

It was due to Lola that I became curious about the United
States. I immediately asked her a lot of questions about that
country, which she hardly answered. When you start out on
journeys in this way, you come back as and when you can. . . .

At the time I'm speaking of, every one in Paris wanted a nice
uniform. Only neutrals and spies hadn't got one, and there
wasn't much to choose between them. Lola had hers and a pretty
little thing it was too, all decked out with little red crosses
on the sleeves and on the diminutive cap, which she always wore
at a tilt on her head of wavy hair. She had come to help us save
France, as she told the manager at the hotel, and though she
couldn't hope to do much, she was ready to do what she could
with all her heart. There was understanding between us at once,
but it was not quite complete because I'd come to dislike the
feelings of the heart very much. I really much preferred the
feelings of the body. One should distrust the heart--the war
had taught me that, very clearly; and I wasn't likely to forget
it.

Lola's heart was tender, weak and enthusiastic. Her body was
charming, very attractive, and the only thing to do was to
accept her as she was. She was a sweet girl really but the war
was between us, that vast and bloody madness which, whether
they wanted it or not, was making one half of humanity drive the
other half into the knacker's yard. And of course a thing like
that was disturbing to our relationship. To me, who was making
my convalescence last as long as possible, and who didn't in the
least want to take my turn again in the blazing graveyards of
the front line, the absurdity of our massacre was startlingly ob-
vious at every step I took in the city. A horrible chicanery
pervaded everything.

However, I had little chance of getting out of it. I knew none
of the sort of people you need to know in order to get out of it.
The only friends I had were poor people, that is to say, people
whose death was of no interest to any one. As for Lola, it was no
good counting on her to help me out of it. In spite of the fact that
she was a nurse, you couldn't imagine a more bellicose creature
than that dear child--except perhaps Ortolan. Before I ever went
into the muddy hash of heroism myself, her little Joan-of-Arc man-
ner might perhaps have thrilled and converted me, but now, after
joining up in the Place Clichy, I was violently ready to reject
all forms of patriotism, either verbal or real. I was cured,
thoroughly cured.

For the convenience of the ladies of the American Expeditionary
Force the group of nurses to which Lola belonged was lodged at
the Paritz Hotel, and to make things pleasanter for her in par-
ticular, because she had certain connections, she was given the
supervision of a special service of apple fritters, which were
delivered from the hotel itself to the hospitals of Paris.
Every morning tens of thousands of them were sent out. Lola
performed this charitable duty with a devotion which, as a
matter of fact, was later to have the very worst effects.

The truth is that Lola had never cooked an apple fritter in her
life. So she engaged a number of professional cooks and soon the
flitters were produced up to time, beautifully juicy, golden and
sweet. All Lola had to do was to taste them before they were
sent out to the different hospitals. Every morning she'd get up
at ten and after her bath go down to the kitchens, which were
below ground near the cellars. Every morning she did that,
dressed only in a black and yellow kimono which a friend from
San Francisco had given her the day before she left.

Everything was going splendidly, in fact, and we were well on
the way to winning the war, when one fine day, at lunch time,
I found Lola in a state of prostration and refusing to eat any
food. I was seized by anxiety lest some misfortune or sudden
illness had overtaken her. I begged her to rely on my loving
care.

Thanks to punctiliously tasting confectionery every day for
a month, Lola had put on two full pounds. Her little waist bulged
in evidence of this disaster. She burst into tears. Wishing to
console her as best I could, I took her in a taxi--in the stress
of the emotion--to a number of drug stores in various parts of
the town. All the weighing machines, chosen at random, implac-
ably agreed that the two extra pounds had been well and
truly added; they were undeniable. I suggested that she should
hand over her job to a colleague who, on the contrary, was eager
to gain weight. Lola would not hear of such a compromise, which
seemed to her shameful, amounting to a desertion of duty. It was
then that she told me of a great-great-great-uncle of hers who
had sailed in the glorious and never to be forgotten Mayflower and
had landed in Plymouth in 1620. In respect to his memory she
couldn't dream of neglecting her culinary duties, which were a
humble, ah yes, but sacred trust.

Anyway, from that day onwards, she only delicately nibbled
her apple fritters, with very even, delightful little teeth. This
horror of putting on fat took all the pleasure out of life for her.
She languished. Soon she was as afraid of the fritters as I was
of shells. We began to go for long healthy walks on the boule-
vards and by the river because of them, and we stopped going to
the Napolitain because ice creams are so bad for ladies' figures.

I had never dreamed of any place as comfortable to live in as
her room, which was all pale blue and had its own bathroom next
door. There were signed pictures of her friends all over it, not
many women but a great many men, good-looking boys, dark and
with curly hair, which was her type. She used to tell me the
colour of their eyes and talk about those loving and solemn
dedications, every one of them final. At first making love among
all these effigies used to worry me, but after a while one gets
accustomed to it.

As soon as I finished kissing her, she'd go on again about the
war and the apple fritters; I couldn't stop her. France came a
good deal into our conversations. In Lola's mind France was a
sort of chivalrous entity, not very clearly defined either in
space or time, but at present grievously wounded and for that
reason extremely exciting. But when people talked to me about
France, I thought at once of my guts, so that of course I was
rather reserved and not very prone to any access of enthusiasm.
Every one has his own fears. However, as she was kind to me in
the matter of sex, I listened without ever contradicting her. But
as far as soul was concerned, I could scarcely be said to satisfy
her. She would have liked to see me keen and eager for the fray,
but I for my part could not conceive why I ought to be in that
exalted state, and I had on the other hand a hundred irrefutable
reasons for remaining in precisely the opposite humour.

After all, Lola was only radiating happiness and optimism in
the way that all folk do whose life is easy, privileged and secure;
who, enjoying these things and good health, can look forward to
living many more years.

She bothered me with her things of the spirit, which she
never stopped talking about. The soul is the body's pride and
pleasure when in health, but it is also a desire to be rid of the
body when one is ill or things are going badly. You choose either
the one attitude or the other, whichever suits you best at the
particular moment, and that's all there is to it! While you are
free to choose between both, all is well. But for me there was
no choice; my course was settled. I was up to the neck in reality
and could see my own death following me, so to speak, step for
step. I found it very difficult to think of anything except a fate
of slow assassination which the world seemed to consider the
natural thing for me.

During this sort of protracted death agony, in which your brain
is lucid and your body sound, it is impossible to comprehend
anything but the absolute truths. You need to have undergone
such an experience to have knowledge forever after of the truth
or falsity of the things you say.

I came to the conclusion that even if the Germans were to arrive
where we were, slaughtering, pillaging and setting fire to every-
thing, to the hotel, the apple fritters, Lola, the Tuileries, the
Cabinet and all their little friends, the Coupole, the Louvre and
the big shops, even if they were to overrun the town and let
hell loose in this foul fair ground, full of every sordidness on
earth, still I should have nothing to lose by it and everything
to gain.

You don't lose anything much when your landlord's house is
burnt down. Another landlord always comes along, if it isn't
always the same one--a German or a Frenchman or an Englishman
or a Chinaman--and you get your bill just the same. . . . Whe-
ther you pay in marks or francs, it doesn't much matter.

Morals, in fact, were a dirty business. If I had told Lola what
I thought of the war, she would only have taken me for a deprav-
ed freak and she'd deny me all intimate pleasures. So I took good
care not to confess these things to her. Besides which, I still
had other difficulties and rivalries to contend with. More than
one officer was trying to take her from me. Their competition
was dangerous, armed as they were with the attraction of their
Legions of Honour. And there was beginning to be a lot about
this damn Legion of Honour in the American papers. In fact, I
think that after she had deceived me two or three times, our
relationship would have been seriously threatened if just then
the minx had not suddenly discovered something more to be said
in my favour, which was that I could be used every morning as a
substitute taster of fritters.

This last-minute specialization saved me. She could accept me
as her deputy. Was I not myself a gallant fighting man and there-
fore worthy of this confidential post? From then onwards we
were partners as well as lovers. A new era had begun.

Her body was an endless source of joy to me. I never tired of
caressing its American contours. To tell the truth, I was an
appalling lecher--and I went on being one.

Indeed, I came to the very delightful and comforting conclusion
that a country capable of producing anatomies of such startling
loveliness, and so full of spiritual grace, must have many other
revelations of primary importance to offer--biologically speak-
ing, of course.

My little games with Lola led me to decide that I would
sooner or later make a journey, or rather a pilgrimage, to the
United States; and certainly just as soon as I could manage it.
Nor did I ever find respite and quiet (throughout a life fated in
any case to be difficult and restless) until I was able to bring
off this supremely mystical adventure in anatomical research.

Thus it was in the neighbourhood of Lola's backside that a
message from a new world came to me. And she hadn't only a fine
body, my Lola,--let us get that quite clear at once; she was
graced also with a piquant little face and grey-blue eyes, which
gave her a slightly cruel look, because they were set a wee bit
on the upward slant, like those of a wildcat.

Just to look into her face made my mouth water like a sip of
dry wine, of silex, will. Her eyes were hard and lacking the an-
imation of that charming trademark vivacity reminiscent of the
Orient and of Fragonard, which one finds in almost all the eyes
over here.

We usually met in a cafe around the corner. Wounded men in
increasing numbers hobbled along the streets, in rags as often
as not. Collections were made on their behalf. There was a "Day"
for these, a "Day" for those, Days above all for the people who
organized them. Lie, copulate and die. One wasn't allowed to do
anything else. People lied fiercely and beyond belief, ridiculously,
beyond the limits of absurdity: lies in the papers, lies on the
hoardings, lies on foot, on horseback and on wheels. Everybody
was doing it, trying to see who could produce a more fantastic lie
than his neighbour. There was soon no truth left in town.

And what truth there was one was ashamed of, in 1914. Everything
you touched was faked in some way--the sugar, the aeroplanes,
shoe leather, jam, photographs; everything you read, swallowed,
sucked, admired, proclaimed, refuted or upheld--it was all an
evil myth and masquerade. Even traitors weren't real traitors.
A mania for lying and believing lies is as catching as the itch.
Little Lola knew only a few phrases in French but they were all
jingo phrases: "On les aura," "Madelon, viens!". . .It was enough
to make you weep.

She hovered over the death which was confronting us, persistently,
obscenely--as indeed did all the women, now that it had become
the fashion to be courageous at other people's expense.

And there was I at that time discovering in myself such a fond-
ness for all the things which kept me apart from the war! I
asked her again and again to tell me about America but she only
answered with vague, silly and obviously inaccurate descriptions,
which were meant to make a dazzling impression on me.

But I distrusted impressions just then. I'd been had that way
once before; I wasn't going to be caught so easily again. Not by
anybody.

I believed in her body, I didn't believe in her mind and heart.
I considered her to be charming and cushily placed in this war,
cushily placed in life.

Her attitude towards an existence which for me was horrible,
was merely that of the patriotic press: Pompon, Fanfare, ma
Lorraine et gants blancs. . . . Meanwhile I made love to her
more and more often, having assured her that it would make
her slim. But she relied more on our long walks to do that. I
hated these long walks myself. But she was adamant.

So for several hours in the afternoon we would stride along in
the Bois de Boulogne, around the lakes. Nature is a terrifying
thing and even when well domesticated as in the Bois she still
inspires a sort of uneasiness in real town dwellers. They are
pretty apt in such surroundings to take you into their confidence.
Nothing like the Bois de Boulogne, wet, railed-in, sleek and shorn
as it is, for calling up a flock of stubborn memories in the minds
of city folk strolling amid trees. Lola was a prey to this mood
of melancholy, confidential unease. As we walked along, she'd
tell me, more or less truthfully, a hundred and one things about
her life in New York and her little friends there.

I couldn't quite disentangle what was convincing from what was
doubtful in all this complicated rigmarole of dollars, engagements,
dresses and jewelry, which seems to have made up her life in
America.

That day we were going towards the race course. At that time
one still came across children on donkeys there, and horse-cabs,
and more children kicking up the dust, and cars full of men on
leave, hunting all the time in the little paths, as fast as poss-
ible, between two trains, for women with nothing to do; they raised
even more dust, in their hurry to go off and have dinner and
make love, agitated and oily, with roving eyes, worried by the
passage of time and the wish to live. They sweated with desire
as well as with the heat.

The Bois was less well-kept than usual, temporarily neglected
by the authorities.

"This place must have been very pretty before the war,"
Lola remarked. "It must have been awfully smart, wasn't it,
Ferdinand? Tell me. Were the races like those in New York?"

To tell the truth, I'd never been to the races before the war
myself, but I at once made up a colourful description of them
for her benefit, basing myself on what I'd often heard about
them from other people. Beautiful dresses . . . smart society
women . . . splendid four-in-hands. . . . They're off! The gay
trumpets ... the water jump. . . . The President of the Republic.
. . . The excitement of changing odds. . . . And so on.

She was so delighted with these idealized vignettes of mine
that my remarks brought us closer together. From that moment
on Lola felt she had discovered a taste which we had in common,
a taste, for my part well dissimulated, for the gay social
round. She even kissed me there and then in her excitement, a
thing which seldom happened with her, I must confess. And then
the sadness of fashions dead and gone overcame her. We all mourn
the passage of time in our own particular way. For Lola it was
the passing of fashion which made her perceive the flight of
years.

"Ferdinand," she asked, "do you think there will ever be races
held here again?"

"I suppose there will, when the war is over, Lola."

"It's not certain, though, is it?"

"No, it's not certain."

The possibility of there never being any more races at Long-
champs upset her. The sadness of life takes hold of people
as best it may, but it seems almost always to manage to take
hold of them somehow.

"Suppose the war goes on for a long time, Ferdinand, for years
perhaps. Then for me it will be too late ... to come back here
. . . . Don't you understand, Ferdinand? You see, I'm so fond
of lovely places like this . . . that are so smart . . . and
attractive. It will be too late, I expect. I shall be old then,
Ferdinand, when the meetings begin again. I shall be already
too old. . . . You'll see, Ferdinand, how it'll be too late. I
feel it will be too late."

And then once again she was filled with despair, as she had
been before about the two pounds' added weight. I said everything
I could think of to reassure her and give her hope. After all, she
was only twenty-three, I told her. . . . And the war would be
over very soon. Good times would come again. As good as before,
better times than before. . . . For her, at least, an attractive girl
like her. . . . Lost time was nothing: she'd make it up as easily as
anything. . . . There'd be people to admire her, to make a fuss
over her, for a long time yet. She put on a less unhappy face, to
please me.

"Must we go on walking?" she asked.

"But you want to get slim?"

"Oh, I'd forgotten that. . . ."

We left Longchamps, the children had gone away. Only the dust
was left. The fellows on leave were still looking for Happiness,
but out in the open now. Happiness was to be tracked down
among the cafe tables around the Porte Maillot.

We walked towards Saint-Cloud along the river banks hazy with
autumn mist. Near the bridge several lighters pressed their bows
against the arches, lying deep in the water, loaded with coal
to the bulwarks.

The park foliage spread itself like an enormous fan above the
railings. These trees are as detached, magnificent and impressive
as one's dreams. But I was afraid of trees too, since I had known
them to conceal an enemy. Every tree meant a dead man. The
avenue led uphill towards the fountains flanked by roses. Near
the kiosk the old lady who sold refreshments seemed slowly to be
gathering all the shadows of evening about her skirts. Further
away in the side alleys great squares and rectangles of darkcol-
oured canvas were flapping; the canvas of the tents of a fair
which the war had taken by surprise and filled with silence.

"They've been away a whole year now," the old lady reminded
us. "Nowadays only a couple of people will come along here in
all the day. I come still, out of habit. . . . There used to be
such a crowd. . . ."

The old lady had understood nothing else of what had happened:
that was all she knew. Lola had a curious desire to walk
past the empty marquees, because she was feeling sad.

We counted about twenty of them, big ones full of mirrors,
and a greater number of small ones, sweet stalls, lotteries, and
a small theatre even, full of draughts. There was one to every
tree; they were all round us. One in particular near the main
avenue had lost its canvas walls altogether and stood empty as
an explained mystery.

They leaned over towards the mud and fallen leaves, these
tents. We stopped close to the last one, which was further aslant
than the rest, its posts pitching in the rising wind like the masts
of a ship with wildly tugging sails about to snap the last of its
ropes. The whole tent swayed, its inner canvas flapping towards
heaven, flapping above the roof. Its ancient name was written in
green and red on a board over the door. It was a shooting alley.
"The Stand of All Nations" it was called.

There was no one to look after it, either. He himself was away
shooting along with the rest perhaps, the proprietor shooting
shoulder to shoulder with his clients.

What a lot of shot had struck the targets of the booth! They
were all spotted with little white pellet marks. There was a funny
wedding scene, in zinc: in front the bride with her bouquet, the
best man, a soldier, the bridegroom with a big red face, and in
the background more guests--they must all have been killed
again and again when the fair was on.

I'm sure you're a good shot, aren't you, Ferdinand? If the
fair was still here, I'd take you on. . . . You shoot well, don't
you, Ferdinand?"

"No, I'm not a very good shot."

Further back, beyond the wedding, was another roughly painted
target--the Town Hall with its flag flying. You shot at the
Town Hall, when it was working, into the windows, and they
opened and a bell rang, and you even shot at the little zinc flag.
And you shot too at the regiment of soldiers marching up a hill
near by, like mine in the Place Clichy; amid all these discs and
uprights, all there to be shot at as much as possible, now it was
I who was to be shot at--who had been shot at yesterday and
would be shot at to-morrow?

"They shoot at me too, Lola!" I cried out. I couldn't help it.

"Come on," she said. "You're being silly, Ferdinand--and
we shall catch cold."

We went on towards Saint-Cloud down the Royal Avenue, avoid-
ing the mud. She held my hand in hers, such a small hand,
but I could think of nothing else but the zinc wedding of the
"Stand of All Nations" which we had left behind us in the gath-
ering darkness. I even forgot to kiss her; it was all too much
for me. I felt very strange.

In fact, I think it must have been from that moment that my
head began to be so full of ideas and so difficult to calm.

When we got to the bridge at Saint-Cloud it was quite dark.

"Would you like to eat at Duval's, Ferdinand? You like Duval's
. ... It would cheer you up. . . . There's always a lot of
people there. Unless you'd rather have supper in my room?"
She was being very attentive that evening, in fact.

We finally decided on Duval's. But we'd hardly got our table
than the place struck me as ludicrous and horrible. All these
people sitting in rows all around us seemed to me to be sitting
there waiting, they too, to be shot at from all sides as they ate.

"Run, all of you!" I shouted to them. "Get out! They're going
to fire! They'll kill you. They'll kill us all."

I was hurried back to Lola's hotel. Everywhere I could see the
same thing happening. All the people in the Paritz seemed to be
going to get themselves shot and so did the hotel clerks at the
reception desk. There they were, simply asking for it, and the
porter man down by the door of the Paritz in his uniform of sky
blue and his braid as golden as the sun, and the soldiers too, the
officers who were wandering about, and those generals--not so
grand as he, of course, but in uniforms nevertheless--it was all
one vast shooting alley from which none of them, not one of
them, could possibly escape.

"They're going to shoot!" I shouted to them at the top of my
voice, in the middle of the main hall. "They're going to shoot!
Clear out, all of you, run away!" Then I went and shouted it
from the window too. I couldn't help myself. There was a terrible
scene. "Poor boy," people said.

The porter took me along, very gently, to the bar. With great
kindness he made me drink, and I drank a lot and then finally
the gendarmes came to fetch me; they were rougher about it.
In the "Stand of All Nations" there'd been gendarmes too. I
remembered having seen them. Lola kissed me and helped them
to handcuff me and lead me away.

After that I was feverish and fell ill; driven insane, they said
in hospital, by fear. They may have been right. When one's in
this world, surely the best thing one can do, isn't it, is to get
out of it? Whether one's mad or not, frightened or not.





THERE WAS QUITE A TO-DO ABOUT IT. SOME SAID: "THE CHAP'S
AN anarchist, and they'll shoot him, of course. Better do it at once,
right away. Can't have any shilly-shallying in war time!" But there
were others, more patient, who held that I was simply syphilitic
and quite genuinely mad and should therefore be shut up until
peace came, or anyhow for several months, because they, the
notmad, who were in full possession of their faculties, they
said, wanted to take care of me while they carried on with the
war on their own. Which just shows that there's nothing like
infernal nerve for making people believe you're sane. If you've
got plenty of cheek, that's enough; pretty nearly anything is
allowed then, any damn thing. You've got the majority on your
side, and it's the majority which decides what is mad and
what isn't.

But they were still very uncertain about my diagnosis, so
the authorities decided to have me kept under observation for
a time. My dear little Lola was allowed to come and see me
sometimes, and so was my mother. But that's all.

They housed us, the wounded and mentally deranged, in a
school at Issy-les-Moulineaux which was specially organized to
receive cases like myself, whose patriotic ideals had either been
slightly shaken or else entirely warped. The idea was, all in good
time, either gently or forcibly, according to circumstances, to
extract a confession from us. We weren't treated downright
badly, but one did feel all the time that one was being watched
by the staff of silent male nurses, all of whom had enormous ears.
After undergoing this surveillance for some time, one was sent
away quietly to the lunatic asylum, or to the front, or even,
pretty frequently, to face a firing squad.

I always wondered which of all the chaps in that sinister
place, as he muttered to himself at table, was next to become
a ghost. . . .

The concierge, who lived in a lodge by the entrance gate, used
to sell us barley sugar and oranges and the materials we needed
for sewing on buttons. She also sold us our pleasure. The price
of pleasure, for N.C.O.'s, was ten francs. It could be had by any
one. But you had to beware of confiding too easily in her at
these moments. Such unburdenings could prove very costly. She
scrupulously repeated all one had told her to the Chief Medical
Officer, and it went into your dossier for a court-martial. It was
pretty well certain that a series of confidences of this sort had
led to the shooting of a lance corporal in the Spahis, not yet
twenty years of age, together with a sapper from the Reserves,
who had swallowed nails to give himself stomach ache, and also
another man, suffering from hysteria, the chap who told how
he had brought on his paralytic fits at the front. . . . One night,
by way of sounding me, she offered to let me have the papers of
a father of six children who had died, so she said, of a disease
of the anus; she suggested I might find them useful. In fact, she
was a thorough bitch. Of course, in bed, she was marvellous
value, one always came back for more and she gave us the hell
of a time. As far as that was concerned, she certainly had it all
taped. You need to, anyway, if you're going to have a real good
time. After all, between the sheets a certain salacious ingenuity is
as essential as pepper is to a good sauce; it makes a finished job
of it.

The school buildings were flanked by a broad terrace, golden
in summer among the trees, from which one could see Paris
grandly unfolding itself in perspective. It was there that vis-
itors waited to see us on Thursdays, Lola among them, punctually
bringing me cakes, advice and cigarettes.

We saw our doctors every morning. They questioned us kindly
but one never quite knew what they were thinking. They went
among us, and in the most charming way in the world dangled
our death warrants in front of our noses.

A good many of the patients under observation, more nervous
than their fellows, were reduced by this torturing atmosphere to
such a state of exasperation that at night, instead of going to
sleep, they got up and paced up and down the dormitory, protest-
ing aloud against the agony within them, huddled between hope
and despair as in a dangerous mountain crevice. They suffered
like this for many days and then suddenly one night they'd col-
lapse completely and go and tell the chief doctor everything.
One never saw them again after that. I wasn't easy in my mind
myself. But when one's weak, the thing that gives one strength
is stripping those one fears of the slightest prestige that
one may still tend to accord them. One must teach oneself to
see them as they are, as worse than they are, that is; one should
look at them from all points of view. This detaches you, sets
you free and is much more of a protection than you can possibly
imagine. It gives you another self, so that there are two of you
together.

Their actions no longer have that foul mysterious power over
you, weakening you and wasting your time, and their foolishness
is no more pleasing to you or useful to your own intimate dev-
elopment than that of the lowest swine.

In the bed next to mine slept a corporal, a volunteer like me.
Previous to the month of August, he told me, he'd been a teacher
of history and geography at a school in the Touraine. After a
month or two at the front this professor proved himself to be
an absolute prince of thieves. They couldn't stop him stealing
canned food from the regimental supply waggons, from the commis-
sariat and company ration dumps, or anywhere else he could
find it.

With the rest of us he had been cast up here, an uncertain figure
on the "case-list" of the Army Council. However, as his family
was trying hard to prove that shellfire had stupefied and de-
moralized him, judgment on his case was deferred from month
to month. He didn't talk to me much. He used to spend hours
combing his beard, but when he did speak, it was almost always
on the same subject,--the method he had discovered to avoid
getting his wife with child. Was he really mad? When the world
is all upside down and it is mad to ask why one is being assas-
sinated, obviously it is very easy to be considered insane. You
have, of course, to give an impression of madness, but when it's
a question of avoiding wholesale slaughter, some minds are cap-
able of magnificent imaginative efforts.

Truly everything that is really interesting goes on in the dark.
One knows nothing of the inner history of people.

Princhard was this schoolmaster's name. What plan can he pos-
sibly have hit upon to keep his arteries, his lungs and his eyes
intact? That's the essential question which we men ought to have
asked each other in order to remain strictly human and sensible.
But we did nothing of the sort; hemmed in by insane martial triv-
ialities tottering along after an absurd ideal, like rats already
stupid with smoke, we tried to escape from the burning ship, but
without any plan of action or any confidence in each other. Be-
wildered by the war, we had become mad in another way; mad with
fear. There you have war seen both ways.

All the same, this Princhard chap seemed to show a certain
liking for me in the midst of our general delirium, though
naturally he was very cautious about it.

Where we were, in our predicament, no friendship, no trust,
could possibly exist. No one expressed aloud anything except
what he thought might help to save his skin, since everything,
or nearly everything, would be repeated by eager sneaks.

From time to time one of us disappeared: that meant that his
case was settled, and would come to an end before the Army
Council, at Biribi, in the front line or, for the more fortunate,
at the asylum at Clamart.

More and more soldiers suffering from doubt kept on arriving
from all sections of the army, some very young and others almost
old, either in an awful funk or else swaggering and crazy. Their
wives and relations and their wide-eyed children visited them
on Thursdays.

Everybody cried copiously in the waiting room, especially in
the evening. The unfit of the wartime world came and wept there
when the wives and children, their visits over, left dragging
their feet along the dim gas-lit corridor. Nothing but a bunch
of disgusting snivelers, that's all they were.

It was still an adventure for Lola to come and see me in this
kind of prison. We two did not cry. We had nothing to cry
about.

"Have you really gone mad, Ferdinand?" she asked me one
Thursday.

"Yes," I confessed, "I have."

"Then are they going to cure you here?"

"Fear can't be cured, Lola."

"Are you as frightened as all that, then?"

"More than that even. Listen, Lola, I'm so frightened that if,
later on, I were to die a natural death, I wouldn't want them to
burn my body. I want to be left in the ground to rot in the cem-
etery, peacefully, ready to start living again maybe. . . . One
can't ever tell! . . . But if I was burnt to ashes, Lola, it would
be all over, quite over. A skeleton, after all, is something like
a man. It is nearer to living again than ashes are. . . .With ashes
it's finished. . . . What do you think? You see, the war--"

"Oh, then you're an utter coward, Ferdinand! You're as repulsive
to me as a rat . .

"Yes, an utter coward, Lola. I refuse to accept war and all that
it entails. I don't want it or desire it. I won't resign myself to
it. I will not let myself be overcome with self-pity because of it.
I simply reject it, absolutely refuse to have anything to do with
it and all its soldiers. If they were nine hundred and ninety-five
million and I were only one alone, they would still be wrong,
Lola, and I right, because I am the only one who knows what I
want. I want not to die."

"But you can't refuse to fight, Ferdinand! Only cowards and
madmen refuse to fight when their country is in danger. . . ."

"Then long live all cowards and madmen! Or rather, may it
be the cowards and madmen who survive! Look, Lola, can you
remember the name of any one of the soldiers who were killed
in the Hundred Years' War? Have you ever tried to find out
one single name among them all? No, you can't; you've never tried,
have you? To you they're all anonymous, unknown and less important
than the least atom in this paper weight on the table in front
of you, less important than the food your bowels digested yest-
erday. You can see that they died for nothing. For nothing at
all, the idiots! I swear that's true; you can see that it is. Only
life itself is of any importance. Ten thousand years hence I bet
you that this war, all-important as it seems to us now, will be
completely forgotten. Possibly a dozen or so learned men may
wrangle about it occasionally, and about the dates of the chief
hecatombs for which it was famous. Up to the present time that
is all that Humanity has ever succeeded in finding memorable
about itself, after a few centuries have gone by, or a few years,
or even after a few hours. ... I don't believe in the future,
Lola."

When she saw how shamelessly I proclaimed my deplorable lack of
courage, she ceased to find me in the least worthy of pity. She
considered me definitely despicable.

She made up her mind to leave at once. It was too much. When
I accompanied her back to the gate of the hospital that eve-
ning, she did not kiss me.

Obviously it was impossible for her to admit that a man con-
demned to death might still not want to die. And when I asked
after our apple fritters she did not even answer me.

When I got back to our room I found Princhard standing before
the window in the middle of a circle of the men, trying out a
pair of spectacles against the gaslight. He had had this idea,
he told us, on a holiday by the seaside, and now that summer
had come, he intended to wear them during the daytime in the
park. This park was an enormous place, well guarded, of course,
by squads of vigilant warders. The next day Princhard insisted
that I should go with him as far as the terrace, because he was
going to try his lovely glasses. The afternoon sun shone down
brilliantly on Princhard protected by his dark glasses. I noticed
that his nostrils were almost transparent and that he breathed
very quickly.

"My friend," he confided in me, "time slips by and sides against
me. . . . My conscience is inaccessible to remorse; I have freed
myself, thank God, from such worries. It's not wrong-doing which
matters in this world. They gave up that a long time ago. It's
blunders. And I think I have been guilty of a blunder ... an
absolutely irreparable one."

"What, stealing canned food?"

"Yes, I thought that was cunning, just imagine! I thought by
that means to get myself taken away from the gunfire, ashamed
of myself but still alive, and to come back to peace as one comes
up to the surface again, exhausted after a long dive. I almost
succeeded. But really the war is lasting too long. ... As it goes
on longer and longer, it becomes harder to conceive of indivi-
duals sufficiently disgusting to disgust their country. The
Motherland has now taken to accepting all sacrifices, wherever
they come from, all the available butcher's meat. She has become
infinitely indulgent as to her choice of martyrs. Nowadays
there are no soldiers unworthy of bearing arms and, above all,
of dying under them and being killed by them. They now say
they're going to make a hero of me! The massacring mania
must be extraordinarily strong that they should have begun to
overlook the theft of a tin of jam! 'Overlook,' did I say? They'll
forget it entirely. True, we've been accustomed day by day to
admire colossal bandits, whose opulence the whole world venerates
as we do, and whose life shows itself to be, when examined closely,
one long crime renewed each day; but these people enjoy glory,
honour and power; their crimes are consecrated by the law,
while as far back as we can go in history--and there I am
in a position to talk--everything shows us that a petty theft,
especially of some trivial foodstuff such as a loaf, a ham or
a cheese, inevitably draws upon the man who commits it the
formal opprobium and categorical repudiation of the community,
with heavy punishment, automatic dishonour, inexpiable shame;
and that for two reasons, first because the author of such a
crime is generally a poor man, which state in itself implies a
fundamental unworthiness, and secondly because his act contains
a sort of tacit reproach to the community. The poor man's theft
becomes a spiteful reprisal by an individual, you understand.
Where does this lead us? You will notice that the repression of
petty larceny is vigorously pursued in all countries, not only as
a means of social defence but also and chiefly as a stern reco-
mmendation to all unfortunates to remember their place and their
caste,--that of wretches submitting joyfully through the cen-
turies and for ever to a death of misery and hunger. Up till now,
however, under the Republic there's been one advantage left
to these petty thieves, that of being deprived of the honour of
bearing their country's arms. But to-morrow this state of affairs
is to change; I, a thief, am going back to-morrow to my place
in the army. Those are the orders. It has been decided in high
places to sponge out what is described as my 'temporary lapse',
and this, mark you, in consideration of what they term 'the good
name of my family.' What benevolence on their part! I ask you,
Comrade, is it my family that is going to serve as a strainer and
a sieve to a mixture of French and German bullets? It will be
just me alone, won't it? And when I am dead, will the honour of
my family resurrect me? Listen, I can see my family now, the
war and everything over--for there is always an end to all
things--here and now I see my family joyously disporting them-
selves on fine Sundays on the lawns of returning summer.
While three feet below ground I, their father, will be streaming
with maggots, stinking more horribly than a heap of bankholiday
dung, all my disillusioned flesh absurdly rotting. To manure
the furrows of an unknown labourer, that is the true future
of the true soldier. Ah, my friend, this world is nothing
but a vast attempt to catch you with your trousers down. . . .
You are young. These moments full of wisdom should be worth
years to you. Listen to what I am telling you, Comrade; note
the danger signal which marks all the murderous hypocrisies of
our society, and never again let it pass you by without fully
grasping its importance. 'Commiseration of the fate and the
condition of the down-at-heel.' I tell you, worthy little pe-
ople, life's riffraff, forever beaten, fleeced, and sweating,
I warn you that when the great people of this world start
loving you, it means that they are going to make sausage meat
of you. That is the sign, it is infallible. And it starts with
affection. Louis XIV, he at least, remember, did not care a
damn about the people. The same applies to Louis XV. He didn't
even bother to kick them in the pants. Life was not easy in
those days, certainly; for the poor, life has never been easy.
But they weren't set upon and gutted quite as rabidly and
ruthlessly as they are by their tyrants of to-day. There is
no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose
only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or
sadism. You must know, as we are on this subject, that it
was the philosophers who first started telling the poor
people stories. The poor man knew nothing but his catechism.
They were out, they said, to educate him. They had various
truths to reveal to him! Fine truths! Not worn-out truths either,
bright shining new ones! They dazzled him completely. 'That's
right, that's right,' the poor devils started in to say. 'That's
absolutely true. We must die for it.' The people have never
asked for anything except to die. It's always the way. 'Long live
Diderot!' they shouted, and then, 'Bravo, Voltaire!' Those are
your real philosophers. And long live Carnot, who's so good at
organizing victories, and long live everybody! Those fellows,
at any rate, won't let the people die in ignorance and supersti-
tion. They show them the way to liberty. They emancipate them. It
doesn't take long! First every one must learn to read the papers.
That is salvation. And quickly too, by God! No more illiterates,
We will have none of them. Nothing but soldiers and citizens
who vote, read, fight, march and blow kisses. The people were
soon done to a turn under this regime. An enthusiasm for freedom
must serve some useful purpose, after all, mustn't it? Danton
wasn't eloquent for fun. A few hoarse roars, loud enough for one
to be able to hear them still, and he had the people under arms
in an instant. And then came the first departure of the first
battalion of the emancipated and frenzied. Of the first voting
and flag-wagging sods led by Dumouriez to Flanders to get holes
drilled in themselves. As for Dumouriez himself, come too late to
this little game of ideals, entirely unlettered, preferring good
clinking coin on the whole, he deserted. He was our last mercenary.
Being a soldier for nothing was a new idea. So new that Goethe,
in spite of his being Goethe, when he came to Valmy, got a shock
at the sight of it. In the presence of those ragged, impassioned
troops, who had come there of their own free will to be ripped to
pieces by the King of Prussia in defence of this brand-new fic-
tion of patriotism, Goethe felt that he still had a great deal
to learn. 'From that day,' he proclaimed magnificently, in his
own inimitable style, 'a new epoch commences? I should damn
well think it does! After that, as the idea worked so well, they
started to turn out heroes in series, and they cost less and less
as the system became more and more perfect. Every one's done
the same. Bismarck, the two Napoleons, Barres, as well as the
bold Elsa. Flag worship promptly replaced divine worship, an
old cloud already punctured by the Reformation and condensed
a long time ago into Episcopal coffers. In the old days the
fanatic fashion was 'Jesus for ever!' and 'Burn the heretics!'
Still, the heretics after all were rare and of their own choosing.
But now, in our time, immense hordes are roused by the cry: 'To
the stake with all gutless sissies, fibreless hacks and innocent
bookworms. Millions, face right! Those who do not want to spit-
cher or assassinate anybody, the stinking pacifists, take, seize
and quarter them. Then truss them up in thirteen different dirty
ways. To teach them how to live, just tear their bowels from their
bodies, their eyes from their sockets, and the years from their
nasty dribbling lives. Let them die, legion after legion of them,
die, turn hollow and hum, bleed, and corrode in acid--all in
order that their country should become more loved, more joyous
and more sweet. And if there are any wretches so low as to refuse
to understand the sublimity of all this, they can straightway go
and bury themselves with the others--but no, not with them, but
at the far end of the cemetery, under the shameful epitaph of
cowards without ideals: because, infamous wretches, they will have
forfeited their glorious right to any particle of the shadow cast
by the monument which the community has raised in the central
alley to commemorate the decent dead, and also their right to the
least echo of a Cabinet Minister's words when he comes one fine
Sunday to have lunch and urinate at the prefect's house, before
yawping emotionally above the graves."

But they were calling Princhard from the bottom of the garden. The
head doctor had sent the warder on duty to fetch him immediately.
]
"I'm coming," said Princhard, and he just had time to hand
me the notes of the speech he had been trying out on me. A comic
thing to do.

I never saw Princhard again. He had the intellectual's vice;
he was futile. The fellow knew too much and it confused him.
He had to resort to a lot of tricks to kindle his own enthusiasm,
to make up his mind.

It's already a long time ago, that evening that he went away,
when I think of it. The houses on the edge of the park stood out
once more clearly, for a moment, as do all things before the night
captures them. The trees grew bigger in the dusk and rose into
the sky to meet the night.

I have never made any attempt to find out what happened to
him, or if he really "disappeared", this Princhard, as was said.
But it is better that he should have disappeared.




THE SEEDS OF OUR MALIGNANT PEACE WERE BEING SOWN
ALREADY IN the war time.

You could guess what it would be like--an hysterical vacuum
--when you saw it stirring in the Olympia den. Down on the
dance floor in the basement, amid a hundred glinting mirrors,
it was prancing in the dust and the despair of negroid-Hebrew-
Saxon strains. Britishers and blacks were there together. Levantines
and Russians were everywhere, smoking, loud-voiced, melancholy
and military, sitting in rows along the crimson sofas. Those
uniforms which one can now only just call to mind were the seeds
of the present day, that ugly thing which is growing still and
which will not for some time yet have finally become manure.

With lusts well roused by a few hours spent at the Olympia
every week, we'd all go along to call on Madame Herote, who
kept a lingerie-cum-glove-cum-bookshop behind the Folies-
Bergere, in the Impasse des Beresinas, which to-day no longer
exists, where little dogs on leashes were brought by little girls
to do their business.

We ourselves were there fumbling for our happiness, which was
threatened savagely from all sides. We were ashamed of wanting
it as we did, but it couldn't be helped; one went to it just the
same. It's harder to lose the wish to love than the wish to live.
One spends one's time in this world killing and adoring, and one
does both together. "I hate you! I adore you!" You defend yourself
and have a good time and pass on life to some biped in the next
century, frantically, at all costs, as if to be continued were
a tremendously pleasant thing, as if, after all, that could make
one live forever. Whatever happens, one has to make love, as one
has to scratch.

My mental condition was improving but my military situation
was still pretty doubtful. I was allowed to go into town from
time to time. The name of our lingerie lady was, as I say, Madame
Herote. Her forehead was low and so narrow that at first one felt
embarrassed in her presence, but her lips had such a way of
smiling, and were so full, that one soon found it impossible to
escape from her. Under cover of an astonishing volubility and an
unforgettable temperament she harboured a number of simple,
rapacious, earnestly mercantile intentions.

She began to make a fortune in a few months, thanks to the
Allies and, particularly, to her own person. The fact is that she
had undergone an operation the year before, and her ovaries had
been removed. This castration, which gave her freedom, made her
fortune. Certain feminine ailments of this sort turn out to be
providential. A woman who is always dreading a possible preg-
nancy is as good as impotent: she will never go far on the road
to success.

Old and young thought, and so did I, that there was an easy
way of making love, not too expensively, in the back premises
of certain lingerie-bookshops. That was still true some twenty
years ago, but since then a number of things have changed, and
this custom has gone out along with others less delightful. Anglo-
Saxon puritanism is drying us up more and more every month;
it has already reduced these impromptu backstair gayeties to
negligible proportions. Marriage and respectability are the
fashion entirely.

Madame Herote put to a good use our last available freedom
to copulate cheaply and standing up. An out-of-work auctioneer
passed by her shop one Sunday, went in and is there still. He was
then just a bit "gaga", and he stayed that way, but that's all.
Their joy was their own affair; no one spoke of it. While the
papers were raving with appeals for every possible patriotic
sacrifice, life went on, carefully rationed and full of foresight,
more cunningly than ever. Such are, like light and shade, the
two sides of the same medal.

Madame Herote's auctioneer used to invest money in Holland
for his better-informed friends and when they got to know each
other well, he did the same for Madame Herote. Her stock of
scarves, brassieres, and almost-chemises attracted a regular
clientele of both sexes and above all incited them to frequent
visits.

Parisians and foreigners continually met behind those short
pink curtains amid the ceaseless babble of the proprietress,
whose solid, voluble and sickeningly perfumed bulk would have
made the most liverish customer frisky. Far from losing control
of these gatherings, Madame Herote got her reward, first in money,
by taking her tithe of these sentimental transactions, and secondly
because a lot of loving went on all around her. She took at least
an equal pleasure in joining couples and separating them, with
her naggings, insinuations and trickery.

Never for a moment did she stop devising delights and alarums.
She encouraged a passionate view of life. And her business went
all the better for it.

Proust, who was half a ghost himself, with extraordinary determ-
ination became immersed in the Infinite, in the misty futility
of the functions and formalities which twine about the people
of society, that vacuum full of phantom desires, of uncertain fools
always awaiting their Watteau, irresolute, smut-fingering seekers
after unlikely isles of amorous enchantment. But Madame Herote,
who came of sound, popular stock, was held firmly to earth by
stupid, healthy, definite desires.

People are so bad perhaps only because they suffer; but it takes
a long time after they have ceased suffering for them to become
a little better. Madame Herote had had a fine success, both
material and emotional, but it had not yet had time to soften
her domineering disposition.

She was no more malicious than most of the little shopkeepers
round about, but she took a great deal of trouble to show she
was, which is why one remembers her chiefly. Her shop was
not only a rendezvous, but a sort of backdoor to a world of
luxury and wealth, into which, much as I had wanted to, I had
never yet entered, and from which I was anyway promptly and
painfully ejected after one furtive intrusion, my first and my
last. The rich in Paris live all together. Their homes form a
wedge, a slice of urban cake whose point touches the Louvre and
whose rounded end meets the trees between the Pont d'Auteuil
and the Porte des Ternes. There it is, the best part of the
town. All the rest is wretchedness and rubble.

When one enters the wealthy quarter one does not at first no-
tice any great difference from other parts of the town, unless
it is that the streets are a little cleaner and that's all. In
order actually to make one's way into the life of the people in
this place, one has to trust to luck or to some intimate relation-
ship. Through Madame Herote's shop one was able to penetrate this
reserve a little, thanks to the Argentines who used to come down
there from the privileged quarters of the town to buy knickers
and chemises and also to fool about with her bevy of ambitious
young friends from the world of music and the theatre, wellformed
little creatures whom Madame Herote took care to gather
around her.

One of these girls, although I had nothing to offer her but my
youth, as the saying goes, began to interest me a great deal too
much. She was called Musyne by the rest of the set.

In Beresinas alley every one knew every one else in each of the
little shops. It was really like a little province of its own,
which had been sandwiched for years on end between two streets
in Paris; in other words, every one spied on and maligned his
neighbour as much as was humanly possible.

On the material side, before the war, what these shopkeepers
talked about was a niggling and desperately thrifty way of life.
Among other trials was the chronic misery of being forced, in
their gloomy interiors, to light the gas as early as four o'clock
in the afternoon, so that the wares in their windows could be seen.
But this, on the other hand, provided suitable lighting for delicate
propositions inside their shops.

Owing to the war, many businesses, despite all efforts, were
going to have to close down; but Madame Herote's, thanks to her
young Argentines, to officers on extra pay and to the counsels
of her friend the auctioneer, was booming in a way which, as can
well be imagined, gave rise to the most scabrous comment.

It was at this time, for instance, that the famous confectioner
at Number 112 suddenly lost his beautiful clients, owing to the
mobilization. The lovely ladies who had come regularly in long
gloves to taste his sweets, now that horses were being requisiti-
oned and they had to come on foot, came no longer. They were never
to return. As for Sambanet, the music binder, he suddenly failed
to resist the desire he had always had to intrigue with some sold-
ier boy. An indiscretion of this sort one unfortunate evening was
enough to wreck his reputation with certain patriotic gentlemen
who straightway accused him of being a spy. He had to shut down.
On the other hand Mademoiselle Mermance, at Number 26, might
have managed very well, things being what they were. Her spec-
ialty had up till then been a certain rubber article which it
may or may not be proper to mention. But she had the greatest
bad luck in that she found it appallingly difficult to get her stock
through from Germany, which is where her goods came from.

It was only Madame Herote, in fact, at this dawn of a new age
of flimsy democratic underclothes, who slid easily into prosper-
ity. People used to write anonymous letters to each other in the
different shops, pretty spicy ones. Madame Herote found more
amusement in writing them to important personages; this in it-
self was evidence of the strong ambition which was the very
foundation of her character. She wrote, for instance, to the
Prime Minister with the sole object of telling him he was a
cuckold; and to Marshal Petain she wrote in English, with the
aid of the dictionary, just to annoy him. But what did it matter?
Anonymous letters were water off a duck's back. Madame Herote
used to get her little bundle of them every day, and very smelly
ones they were, too. They used to flabbergast her and make her
thoughtful for ten minutes or so, but she would invariably quite
quickly get over it somehow, on any pretext that came to hand,
because in her inner life there was no room at all for doubts
and still less for truth.

Among her clients and protegees there were quite a few girls
who came to her with more debts than clothes. Madame Herote
gave all of them sound advice and they made good, Musyne among
them, who seemed to me the most attractive of the lot. An an-
gelically musical little creature she was, an absolute pet of a
violinist, but a very unconcerned pet, as she soon showed me. She
was quite determined to be a success in this world and not in the
next, and when I met her she was managing very well in an utterly
charming and very Parisian little act, long since forgotten, at the
Varietes. She used to come on with her violin in a sort of rhyming
and musical prelude; a complicated and delightful type of entertainment.
Infatuated with her as I was, I had a frantic time of it, dashing
from the hospital to her stage door. I was, of course, not the
only one to wait for her there. She would be whisked away on the
arm of a territorial or more easily still on that of an aviator.
But the palm of seduction went to the Argentines. As fresh
contingents swarmed into being, their frozen-meat industry had
practically become one of the forces of nature. Little Musyne did
as well as she could out of that boom period. She was quite right;
the Argentines are now no more.

I couldn't make it out. I was a cuckold in everything--in women,
in money, in ideas. I was being deceived and I was unhappy.
Even in these days I sometimes come across Musyne by chance,
about once in every two years, as one does meet people that
one has known very well in the past. Two years is just the in-
terval that is needed to make you aware at one glance, irrefutably
and as if instinctively, of the ugliness that has come over a
face, even one which was delicious in its day.

For a moment one hesitates before it and then finally one accepts
this face as it now is, with all its awful, increasing lack of
beauty. You have to acquiesce in this careful caricature which two
years have slowly etched. You have to admit the passage of time,
accept its portraiture of yourself. Then you can say that you
really have recognized each other (as at first one hesitates to take
a foreign bank note), and that you weren't on the wrong road, that
you have been going along in the right direction all this time,
without ever having come together; two more years along the
unavoidable highroad, the road to rottenness. And that's all
there is to it.

Whenever she met me casually like this, Musyne was so shocked
by the sight of me that she seemed to want to run right away, to
run off and avoid me somehow. . . . She didn't like the look of
me, that was obvious; I reminded her of a whole past life. But I
know her age, I've known it too many years; there's nothing she
can do, she can't escape me any more. So she stands there, looking
annoyed to see that I exist, as if she were face to face with some
monster. She, who is so sensitive, seems to think she has to ask
me idiotic and thick-headed questions, like a housemaid caught
out by her mistress in some misdemeanour. Women are all house-
maids at heart. But perhaps she imagines this repulsion rather
than feels it; that is my remaining consolation. Perhaps all that
I suggest to her is that I am horrible to look at. Perhaps I am
an artist in that line. After all, why should there not be as much
possible artistry in ugliness as in beauty? It's one line to take
up, that's all.

I had for a long time thought little Musyne stupid, but that
was only because I was vain and had been jilted by her. Before
the war, you know, we were all of us much more ignorant and
fatuous than we are to-day. We knew practically nothing about
the world in general: a lot of oafs we were, in fact. Little people
like myself were much more liable to mistake cheese for chalk in
those days than they, are to-day. Because I was in love with
Musyne, I imagined that that was going to give me added strength
in everything, above all, that it would give me the courage I lacked,
all because she was so pretty, so musical and sweet, the little
darling! Love is like alcohol; the more intoxicated and incapable
you are, the stronger and quicker-witted you think yourself, and
the surer you are of your rights.

Madame Herote, several of whose cousins had been killed at
the front, never left home except in deep mourning; actually she
didn't go into town often, as her auctioneer friend was rather
jealous. We used to meet in the dining room at the back of the
shop, which with this new-found prosperity had blossomed into
quite a salon. We gathered there and talked and passed the time,
very properly and prettily, in the gas-light. At the piano little
Musyne would charm us with classical music, classics being the
only suitable thing to play in those sad times. We would sit there
right through the afternoon, side by side, with the auctioneer in
the middle, nursing all together our secrets, fears and hopes.

The servant whom Madame Herote had recently engaged was
very keen to know when each of us was finally going to decide
to marry somebody else in the group. Where she came from in
the country, love without wedlock was inconceivable. All these
Argentines, officers and ferreting clients filled her with almost
animal apprehension.

Musyne was more and more often being taken up by South
American customers. The result was that I came to know the
servants' quarters of these gentlemen very well, because I used
to wait there for my beloved. Their valets used of course to take
me for a pimp. After a while every one used to take me for a
pimp, including Musyne herself and, I believe, all the habitues of
Madame Herote's shop. There was nothing I could do about it.
It was bound to happen sooner or later, anyway; people have to
classify you in some way or other.

I got the military authorities to allow me another two months'
sick leave and there was even some talk of invaliding me. Musyne
and I decided to go and live together at Billancourt. She did it
really so as to be able to trick me all the more easily; she used
to come home less and less often, on account of our living such
a long distance out of town. She was always finding new excuses
for staying in Paris.

Our nights at Billancourt were sweet; sometimes they would be
disturbed by silly air-raid alarms which provided the inhabi-
tants with a chance to feel frightened and justified. While
I waited for my mistress, I used to walk, when night had fallen,
as far as the Pont de Grenelle, where the shadows of the river
rise as far as the platform of the overhead Metro, with its neck-
lace of lights high in the darkness and a mass of metal rails
roaring straight into the side of the great apartment houses on
the Quai de Passy.

There are certain comers like that in big towns which are so
offensively hideous that one is almost always alone in them.
Musyne ended up by only returning to what I may call our
hearth and home once a week. She was more and more frequently
being engaged to accompany singers at the Argentines' houses.
She could have made her living playing at cinemas and it would
have been much easier for me to go and fetch her from there, but
the Argentines were amusing and paid well, whereas the cinemas
were depressing and paid badly. Life is made up of such choices.
The last straw for me was the foundation of the Theatre aux
Armees. Musyne immediately got to know people at the War Of-
fice and was continually going off to entertain our brave lads
at the front--for weeks at a time. She expounded sonatas and
adagios to the troops, with the General Staff, nicely placed in
the stalls, admiring her legs; the rank and file on the benches
behind their superior officers could enjoy only audible harmonies.
Naturally, too, she had to spend eventful nights in hotels in the
war zone. One day she came back to me from the line full of high
spirits and boasting a certificate for bravery, signed, if you
please, by one of our great generals. This diploma was the start-
ing point of a definitely successful career.

In the Argentine colony she made herself extremely popular at
once. She was endlessly feted. Every one was mad about my
Musyne, such a dear little active-service violinist! So sweet and
curly-headed, and a heroine into the bargain. These Argentines
knew a good thing when they saw one; they professed a limitless
admiration for our leaders, and when my Musyne was returned
to them with her impressive document, her cute face, and her
lively, heroic little fingers, they began to make love as fast as
they could, outbidding each other, one might say, in competition
for her. The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who
don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is
making enormously wealthy. It's always so.

Oh, this gallant, rebellious patriotism, it's enough to make one
sick! The Rio shipowners offered themselves and their shares
in marriage to the sweet little thing who was so prettily typifying
for their benefit the valiant French nation at arms. I must
admit that Musyne had thought out for herself a very attractive
little repertoire of war stories, which suited her to perfection,
like a saucy little hat. She often astonished even me with her
finesse, and, hearing her talk, I had to acknowledge that in the
matter of drawing long bows I was clumsiness itself compared to
her. She had a gift for placing her flights of fancy in distant,
dramatic settings which somehow lent them precision and credi-
bility. As for us combatants, we, I suddenly realized, merely
existed in the realm of these conceits as temporary, cloddish
adjuncts. Things eternal were the stuff my pretty one worked in.
One must believe Claude Lorrain when he says that the foreground
in a picture is always unattractive and that Art demands that
the interest of the canvas should be placed in the far distance,
where lies take refuge, those dreams which blossom out of fact
and are man's only love. A woman who can take account of the
wretchedness of our natures easily becomes our darling, our
vital and supreme inspiration. We expect of her that she shall
preserve our lying raison d'etre, but all the while she can, in
exercising this magic function, to a large extent earn her own
living. Musyne, by instinct, did not fail to do so.

The Argentines lived in the Ternes direction, chiefly around the
Bois in smart, aloof little villas, so cosy and warm inside that
when you came in from the street these winter days your thoughts
all of a sudden took an optimistic turn, in spite of yourself.

So distressed and nervous was I that, as I have said, I used to
go as often as possible, making a complete fool of myself, to wait
for my lady-love below stairs. I hung around patiently, sometimes
until morning came; I was sleepy, but jealousy, and a lot of white
wine which the servants gave me, kept me well awake. As for the
Argentine masters of the house, I very seldom saw them ; I heard
the songs they sang, their rumbling Spanish and the piano which
never stopped playing. But mostly it was played by other hands
than Musyne's. What was she doing with her hands all this time,
the little tart?

When in the morning we used to meet on the doorstep, she pulled
a face at seeing me again. I was still as natural as an animal in
those days; I wouldn't give her up, as a dog won't leave a bone.
And that's all there was to it.

A great part of one's youth is lost in trial and error. It was
obvious that the girl I loved was going to throw me over, and
that before very long. I hadn't yet learnt that there are two
human races on this earth, the rich and the poor, and that they
aren't at all the same. It's taken me, as it's taken so many people,
twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my own group and
to ask the price of things and people before laying hands on them,
and especially before setting any store by them.

And so it was that, while I warmed myself in the kitchen
with my servant companions, I failed to understand that above
my head the Argentine gods were dancing. They might have been
German, French or Chinese, that didn't matter in the least--
but they were gods; they were the Rich, that's what it was im-
portant to understand. They were upstairs, with Musyne; I was
downstairs, without anything. Musyne was thinking seriously of
her future; naturally she preferred to plan it with a god. I too, of
course, thought of my future, but rather wildly, because all the
time, secretly, I had the fear of being killed in the war and also
the dread of dying of hunger in peace time. I was in constant
terror of death and I was in love. It was an absolute nightmare.
Not far away, less than sixty miles away, millions of brave,
well-armed, well-trained men were waiting for me to kill me, and
there were Frenchmen too, waiting to have the skin off my bones
if I didn't want to have it flayed to bleeding ribbons by the other
lot opposite.

The poor man has two fine ways of dying in this world, either
through the complete indifference of his fellow men in time of
peace or by the homicidal fury of these same fellow men when
war comes. If people start to think about you at all, then it's how
to torture you they think of at once; and nothing else but
that. You're of no interest to them, the swine, except when you're
bleeding. Princhard was quite right on that point. When the
slaughterhouse is near, you don't bother very much about anything
to do with your future, you only think of loving in the
days that are left to you, because that is the only way to forget
for a moment about your body, which you'll soon be having slit
for you from top to toe.

I considered myself an idealist, because Musyne was running
away from me. That's the way one clothes one's little private
instincts in big words. My leave was coming to an end. The
papers urged the recall of all available combatants, those who
had no relatives first of all, of course. It was official that there
was to be no more thought of anything except of winning the war.
Musyne too was very keen, just like Lola, that I should go back
to the front at once, or sooner, and stay there. But as I seemed
to be rather slow in starting, she made up her mind to hustle
things, which wasn't, as a matter of fact, at all like her.
One evening, when for a change we were actually going home
to Billancourt together, fire-brigade buglers came out to give the
alarm, and all the people in our house scuttled down into the cellars
in honour of some Zeppelin or other.

These little scares, during which the inhabitants of a whole
neighbourhood, to escape from an almost entirely imaginary
danger, would disappear underground in pyjamas, grasping candles
and clucking, were a measure of the distressing absurdity of these
creatures, who behave at one moment like a lot of frightened
hens, at the next like fatuous, docile sheep. It is monstrous
incongruities like this which are so well calculated to revolt the
most patient, the most obstinate believer in society, for good
and all.

As soon as the first bugle call sounded, Musyne forgot all about
the heroism she'd been taught at the Theatre des Armees. She
begged me to rush down with her into a subway, the Metro or a
coal hole--anywhere, as long as we lost no time about reaching
safety in the depths of the earth. Seeing them all scurrying like
this, our fellow tenants, large and small, silly or sedate, four
by four, into any hole which seemed safe, gave me in the end a
feeling of indifference. There's not much to choose between be-
ing brave and being cowardly. The same man will be a rabbit on
one occasion and a hero on the next, and equally unconscious of
what he's doing on both. Everything that is not making money
is miles beyond him. What life and death really are does not
enter his mind. Even his own death he envisages unclearly and all
wrong. Money and footlights are all he understands.

Musyne began to snivel when I refused to go. Other tenants
pressed us to join them and finally I allowed myself to be per-
suaded. A lot of different suggestions were made as to which
cellar we should choose. The butcher's eventually gained the
majority of votes, as it was supposed to be deeper than any of
the others in the block. Across its threshold came whiffs of a
pungent smell with which I was very familiar and which I suddenly
found intolerable.

"Are you going down there, Musyne, with all that meat hanging
on hooks?" I asked her.

"Why ever not?" she asked in great surprise.

"Well, personally," I said, "there are certain things I don't
forget, and I'd rather go back upstairs. . . ."

"Are you leaving me then?"

"Yes, you can come and find me again when it's all over."

"But it may go on for a long time."

"I'd rather wait for you upstairs," I said. "I don't like dead
meat, and it will be over soon."

While the raid lasted, these refugees, intrenched and safe,
exchanged compliments and banter. Ladies in dressing gowns,
the last to arrive, swept swiftly and majestically towards this
malodourous den and were received with ceremony by the butcher
and his wife, who apologized continually for the artificial cold
necessary to the proper preservation of their meat.

Musyne disappeared with the rest. I waited for her upstairs in
our apartment that night, all next day, a whole year. . . . She
never came back to me.

From that time onwards, I found it harder and harder to be
contented and there were only two ideas in my head: to save
my hide and to go to America. But to escape the war was
enough of a job, to start off with, to keep me breathless for
months on end.

"Guns! Men! Munitions!"--The patriots seemed never to tire
of clamouring for them. Apparently no one would be able to
sleep until poor little Belgium and innocent Alsace had been
snatched from under the German yoke. One gathered that our
choicest spirits were so troubled about it all that it prevented
them from breathing, eating and copulating. Yet it didn't seem
to stop any one who was still alive from doing business. Morale
back of the lines was certainly excellent.

Gaps in the ranks had to be filled right away. But as soon as
they examined me, I was found to be still too far below normal,
and only fit to be sent on to another hospital, this time one
given over to fractures and nervous cases. One morning six of
us left the Depot, three dragoons and three artillerymen, ill or
wounded, looking for this place where they could cure loss of
spirit, disordered reflexes and broken arms. Like all the wounded
at that time, we were sent first of all to be looked over at
Val-de-Grace, that portly, noble, tree-girt citadel, whose corridors
smelt so like a third-class railway carriage, with that strong
blending stench of feet, straw and oil lamps. Our sojourn at
the Vai was not a long one; they took one look at us, then
two twitching, overworked officers gave us the devil of a
talking to and threatened us with court-martial, and we were
shot out into the street again by other members of the staff.
They'd no room for us there, they said, telling us vaguely where
to go--to some bastion, somewhere on the outskirts of the town.

Stopping for an absinthe here and a coffee there, and continually
misdirected on our way, we blundered along, all six of us,
looking for this new home where, apparently, a specialty was made
of the care of incapable heroes like ourselves.

Only one among the six of us had any scrap of personal property,
and actually that was all contained in a tin labelled "Pernot
Biscuits", a brand which was well known at the time though
now one no longer hears of it. This chap had some cigarettes
and a toothbrush in the tin; we all pulled his leg about the
care he took of his teeth, which wasn't at all a usual habit in
those days, and called him a pansy for being so outlandishly
refined.

At last, about midnight, after a great deal of uncertainty,
we came to the dark and bulging buttresses of this Bastion de
Bicetre, "No. 43", as it was called. It looked all right to us.
It had just been restored to house the old and lame. The garden
wasn't even finished. When we arrived, there was no one living
there, in the military part of the building, except the concierge. It
was raining hard. The concierge was frightened of us when she
first heard us, but we made her laugh by slapping her at once
on the right spot.

"I thought it must be the Germans!" she said.

"They're a long way off," we told her.

"Where are you wounded?" she asked us anxiously.

"Everywhere--but not where it matters!" one of the artillery
blokes answered her. Well, that of course was a terribly funny
thing to say and the concierge certainly appreciated how funny
it was.

We lived in future in this same bastion with some old men
lodged there by the Poor Relief. New buildings full of miles
and miles of glass had been quickly run up for them, and they
were kept there for the duration of the war, like insects. On the
slopes round about a mass of attenuated little allotments struggled
for possession of a sea of mud, which lapped up to the doors of
several rows of precarious cabins. Sheltered by them, from time
to time a lettuce and three radishes grew there; and, for some
obscure reason of their own, the disgusted slugs would leave
them to the owner of that particular allotment.

Our hospital was beautifully clean, as they are for several
weeks if you're quick and have a look at them directly, after
they've been started, because as a nation we take no care for
the upkeep of things; in fact, on this sort of point we're plumb
lazy. We went to bed joyfully, as I say, on metal bedsteads and
by the light of the moon; the whole place was so new that elect-
ricity hadn't reached it yet.

Early next morning our new doctor came and introduced himself
to us. He was all cordiality on the surface, seeming very
pleased to see us. He himself had good reason to be in a good
humour, he had just been made a major. Besides which,he had
a pair of very beautiful eyes, velvety and deep, which he used
freely to make havoc among the four charming and sympathetic
nurses, who were always out to please him with captivating little
ways, and never missed his smallest gesture. As soon as he met
us, he took control of our dilapidated morale without more
ado. He told us so himself, taking one of us familiarly by the
shoulders and shaking him in a fatherly way. In comforting tones
he outlined for us the regulations as well as the shortest and
quickest route for us to go back like good fellows and get our-
selves shot up again.

Wherever they came from, they definitely could think of nothing
else. One would have thought it did them good to think that
way. It was a new form of vice.

"France has put her trust in you, my friends--like a woman,
like the most beautiful of women!" he chanted. "France relies on
your gallantry! She has been made a victim of the most cowardly,
the most abominable aggression! She has a right to demand from
her sons the utmost vengeance. She must have every inch of
French territory restored to her, cost what sacrifice it may! We
shall, for our part, all do our duty here--my friends, see that
you do yours! Our skill belongs to you: use it! All its resources
will be devoted to healing you. Help us in your turn with willing
cooperation. I know we can count on that, on your good will.
And soon you will be able to take your place once more, your
rightful place, beside those other brave lads in the trenches,
defending our beloved soil. Vive la France! Onward, my boys, to
victory!" He knew how to talk to soldiers.

We stood at attention listening to him, each at the foot of his
own bed. Behind him one of the group of pretty nurses, a
brunette, could hardly control her feelings and was crying a little.
The others were doing their best to comfort her: "It'll be all
right, dearie. . . . He'll come back, you'll see. . .

Her cousin, the rather plump blonde, was consoling her best.
She told me, as she passed us with her arms round her, that her
pretty cousin had been overcome in this way because her fiance
had just joined up in the navy. Our ardent lecturer was discon-
certed and tried to mitigate the beautiful and tragic impression
made by his short and glowing harangue. He stood before her, con-
fused and very worried. He had roused too painful an anxiety
in so tender and sensitive a breast, capable obviously of the
deepest feeling. "If only we had known, Doctor," whispered the
blonde cousin, "we could have warned you. ... You see, they're
so much in love with each other!" The nurses, together with the
doctor, went off noisily down the passage, chattering hard. No
one bothered about us.

I tried to remember and understand the sense of the speech we
had just had from this man with the beautiful eyes, but, per-
sonally, when I thought them over, these words, far from making
me sad, seemed to me extraordinarily well calculated to put me off
dying. The other fellows thought so too, but they did not see
in them as well a sort of insulting defiance, as I did. They didn't
in the least try to understand what was happening around us in
life; they only barely realized that the ordinary madness of the
world had swollen during the last months to such proportions
that truly there was no longer anything stable on which to prop
one's existence.

Here in hospital, as in those nights in Flanders, death harried
us--only that here we were not so closely threatened by it,
though it was just as inexorable as it had been out there, once
the vigilant care of the authorities had aimed it at you.

We weren't yelled at here, it's true; we were even spoken to
with kindness; they spoke to us always on any subject except
death--yet every form we were asked to sign was our death
warrant; we were sentenced in every precaution they took on our
behalf. Medals. . . . Identity disks. . . . The least leave we were
given, the smallest piece of advice. . . . We felt that we were
counted, supervised, numbered in the great reserve of those who
would be going off to-morrow. And so, naturally, all these civilians
and doctors who surrounded us seemed lighter-hearted than us
by comparison. The nurses, little bitches, did not share our
destiny; their only thought was to live long, and go on living
and, of course, fall in love, and wander around, and make love
not once but again and again. Every one of these sweeties nursed
a little plan in her insides, like a convict,--a plan for later on,
for making love, when we should have died in the mud somewhere,
God knows how.

Then they would sigh for you with extra-special tenderness,
which would make them even more attractive than they were
already, and in silence, deeply moved, they would call to mind
the tragic days of the war, the ghosts of time gone by. . . . "Do
you remember little Bardamu?" They would say, thinking of me,
as the evening shadows lengthened. "The boy who coughed so,
and we could never stop him coughing? Poor lad. I wonder what
became of him?"

A little sentimental regret at the right time and place becomes
a woman as well as wisps of fine-spun hair in the moonlight.

Behind everything they said, behind all their solicitude, what
one had to be able to read was this: "You're going to die, soldier
boy, you're going to die. There's a different life for each of us--
a different part for each of us to play--a different death for each
of us to face. We seem to be sharing the wretchedness of your
lot --but death cannot be shared with any one. . . . Everything
should be a matter of enjoyment for healthy souls and bodies, no
more or less, and we are fine young women, beautiful, respected,
healthy and well brought up. . . . For us everything becomes,
by instinctive biological law, a joyous spectacle and a source of
happiness! Our health demands that it should be so; we must
not allow the ugliness of sorrow to encroach upon us. . . . What
we need is something stimulating, nothing but stimulants. . . .
We shall soon forget all about you, soldier boy. ... Be kind,
and hurry up and die . . . and let the war stop soon, and then
we can marry one of your charming officers. A dark and handsome
one, if possible. . . . Hurrah for our country, as Father always
says! Mustn't love be wonderful when your beau comes back
from the war! The man we shall marry will be a very distinguished
soldier. . . . He'll have a lot of medals. . . . And you may polish
his lovely boots on our happy wedding day, if you're still alive
when that day comes, soldier boy. . . . Then won't you be glad
to see us so happy, soldier boy?"

Every morning we saw our doctor, we kept on seeing him, with
his nurses always in attendance. He was a very clever man, we
were told. The old men from the almshouse near by used to
come hobbling past our part of the building, unevenly and
fatuously. They wandered from room to room, carrying with
them their tainted breath and a store of wheezing, raggle-taggle
gossip and jabbering, contemptible chitchat. Cloistered here in
their official poverty, as in a moat of slime, these old workmen
lived on the filth which accumulates about the human soul after
long years of servitude--impotent hatreds rotted by the piddling
idleness of communal living rooms. They devoted their last
trembling energies to doing a bit of harm and destroying what
little life and joy was left to them.

That was their supreme pleasure. There was no longer a single
particle of their dried-up bodies that was not entirely cruel.
As soon as it was arranged that we soldiers should share the
relative comforts of the bastion with these old men, they began
to hate us in unison, though they gathered around all the same
to beg through the windows for odds and ends of tobacco and
bits of stale bread from under the benches. Their parchment faces
were pressed at mealtimes against the panes of our refectory
windows. They peered at us with screwed-up, bleary eyes, like
greedy rats. One of these old wrecks seemed to be more cunning
and quicker witted than the rest; he came and sang the popular
ditties of his day to us for our amusement. Papa Birouette they
called him. He was perfectly willing to do any mortal thing for
you as long as you gave him tobacco--any mortal thing, that is,
except walk past the morgue in the bastion, which was never
empty. One of the usual jokes was to take him along in the
direction of the morgue, as if for a stroll. "Won't you come
on in?" you'd say to him, just as you got level with the
door. Then he'd rush away, wheezing, as fast and as far as
his legs would carry him and you saw nothing more of Papa
Birouette for a couple of days at least. He had caught sight
of death.

For the purpose of putting some spirit into us, our medical of-
ficer, Doctor Bestombes, of the beautiful eyes, had had installed
a lot of very complicated paraphernalia in the way of shining
electrical apparatus with which he gave us shocks every so often.
He claimed these currents had a tonic effect; one had to put up
with them or be thrown out. It seems that he was a very rich
man, Bestombes; he must have been, to be able to afford all
these costly electrocuting gadgets. His father-in-law, a figure in
the political world, had wangled things well in buying land for
the Government and so could afford to allow him these extrava-
gances.

One had to take advantage of it. Everything works out all
right,--crimes and punishments. Such as he was, we did not
hate him too much. He examined our nervous systems extraor-
dinarily carefully and asked us questions with polite familiarity.
This nicely regulated kindliness of his was the great delight of
the nurses under him, who were all well-bred; dear little things,
they looked forward each morning to the moment for enjoying
his display of charming manners, like kiddies expecting a lump
of candy. We were all acting in a play in which he, Bestombes,
had chosen the part of the understanding philanthropist, the
wise and kindly man of science. You had to know what you
were at, then it was all right.

In this new hospital I shared a room with a Sergeant Branledore,
who had served once and been called up again. Branledore was
a hospital guest of long standing. For months and months he'd
trailed his perforated guts from clinic to clinic, having run
through four of them.

In the course of this progression he had learned how to attract
and to hold the active sympathy of nurses. He brought up, and
pissed, blood, and he bled internally pretty often, did Branledore,
and he had very great difficulty in breathing; but these things
would not have sufficed to win him the quite special good graces
of the nursing staff, which had seen them frequently enough. So,
if a doctor or a nurse was passing, between two fits of choking,
Branledore would cry out, "Victory! Victory! It shall be ours!"
--or he muttered it with as much or as little of the breath in
his lungs as he could, according to the circumstances. Having
fallen into line in this way with the right enthusiastically warlike
ideals, thanks to an opportune piece of play-acting, he enjoyed
the highest prestige. He'd got it taped all right.

The whole thing was pure theatre; you had to play a part, and
Branledore was absolutely right. Nothing looks so silly and is
more irritating, after all, than a dumb member of the audience
who has strayed onto the stage by mistake. When you are there,
dash it, you've got to enter into the spirit of the thing, you've
got to wake up and act, make up your mind or clear out. The women,
above all, wanted to see something going on and they were without
pity for the amateur who dried up. There's no question about it,
war goes straight to their tummies. They wanted heroes and
those who weren't heroes either had to look as if they were or
be prepared to undergo the utmost ignominy.

After we had spent a week in this joint, we realized how
urgently necessary it was to pull a different sort of face, and
thanks to Branledore (a lace merchant in private life), these
same fear-struck men, obsessed by shameful memories of slaugh-
ter, shunning the light--and that is what we had been when
we first arrived--were now transformed into a bloody band
of fire eaters, determined on victory and, I assure you, all out
for slaughter and bristling with the most terrifying intentions.
Ours had become a terse speech, so tough, in fact, that some-
times these ladies blushed to hear it, although of course they
never complained because, as every one knows, a soldier is as
brave as he is thoughtless, and coarse more often than he need
be; and the fouler-mouthed he is the braver he is.

At first, though we did our best to copy Branledore faithfully,
our little patriotic gestures did not strike quite the right note;
they weren't truly convincing. A full week and more of intensive
rehearsing was needed before we reached a really high standard.

As soon as our Doctor Bestombes noticed, in his wisdom, the
brilliant improvement of our mental and moral state, he decided,
by way of encouraging us further, to let us have visitors come
and see us, our relations first of all.

Some soldiers who are really good at their job, so I had heard,
experienced in the thick of battle a sort of intoxication and some-
times even acute sensual pleasure. For my part, no sooner did I try
to imagine a sensual pleasure of this very remarkable kind than
I went sick for at least a week. I felt so incapable of killing
anybody that it was definitely better for me to give it all up
right away and not to think of trying. Not that I hadn't had the
necessary practice--they had indeed done everything they could
to give me a taste for it--but the gift itself was lacking. Perhaps
I ought to have been initiated rather more slowly.

One day I decided to tell Doctor Bestombes about the difficulty
I had in being as brave, body and soul, as I should have liked
to be and ought, in the present sublime circumstances, to have
been. I was rather afraid that he would consider me impertinent,
forward and too talkative. But not at all. Quite the reverse.
The good doctor expressed himself as altogether delighted that
I should have come to him in this frank way to lay bare the
troubles of my soul.

"You're better, Bardamu, my friend! You know, you're much
better, that's what it is," was the conclusion he came to. "Your
coming to me like this, quite spontaneously, to confide in me,--
you know, Bardamu, I consider that a very encouraging indication
of a distinct improvement in your state of mind... . Vaude-
squin, that humble yet how wise observer of cases of faltering
morale among the soldiers of the Empire, once indeed summed
up his conclusions in a monograph which, although unjustly
overlooked by present-day students of such things, has now
become a classic. In it he described very clearly and precisely
crises of confession, as they are called, which, when they occur,
are the surest of all signs of a moral convalescence. Our great
Dupre, almost half a century later, established in connection with
the same symptom his definition, since become famous, of this
very crisis, which he calls a crisis of 'reassembled memories',
and goes on to state that it should, if the cure be well conduct-
ed, shortly precede a general collapse of the fear complexes and
a definite clearance of the conscious area of the mind, thereby
constituting the second stage in the course of psychic rehabilita-
tion. Elsewhere Dupre, in that brilliantly metaphorical termino-
logy of which he alone seems to have had the secret, gives the
name of 'thought-flux of relief' to that condition of the patient
which is manifested by a very active sensation of harmony, a most
noticeable release of the activity of reflexes including, among
other phenomena, a marked increase in sleep, which will suddenly
continue for twenty-four hours at a time; and finally a further
stage, to wit, superactivity of the genital functions, to such a
degree that it is not unusual to observe crises of veritable erotic
frenzy in patients previously frigid. Hence the formula: 'The
sick man does not struggle through to health; he rushes headlong
at it.' Such is the, I think you will agree, magnificently des-
criptive phrase for these triumphant recuperations which an other
of our great French psychiatrists of the last century, Philibert
Margeton, applies to the truly marvellous reawakening of all
normal activities in patients recovering from fear neuroses... .
As for you yourself, Bardamu, I consider you therefore already
on the road to recovery... . Would it interest you to know,
Bardamu, since we have now reached this satisfactory conclusion
that as a matter of fact I am to-morrow reading a paper to the
Society for Research into Military Psychology on the essential
qualities of the human spirit? It is not, I flatter myself, en-
tirely without weight..."

"Indeed, sir, these matters are of the keenest interest to me..."

"Well then, Bardamu, let me explain to you, in a word, the
theory I am putting forward in this paper. I hold that, before
the war, Man was a closed book to the psychiatrist and the
resources of his mind an enigma...

"That is exactly my own most humble opinion too, sir."

"You see, Bardamu, the war, affording as it does various in-
comparable means of testing nervous systems, acts as a wonder-
ful revealer of the human spirit. We have been given recently
enough material in the way of pathological discoveries to last
us a century of careful meditation and absorbing study... .
Up till now we had done no more than suspect the treasures of
Man's emotional and spiritual make-up. But now, thanks to
the war, we have won through! We have broken into the innermost
precincts of Man's mind, painfully, it is true, but as far
as science is concerned, providentially, decisively. .. .As soon
as the first revelations were to hand, for me personally the duty
of the modern psychologist and moralist was no longer the least
in doubt. We need to overhaul completely all our psychological
ideas."

That is just what I, Bardamu, thought too.

"I think, sir, that what ought to be done--"

"Ah, yes, you think so too, Bardamu; you don't need me to
tell you! The good and the bad, you see, are balanced in Man's
mind, selfishness on the one hand, altruism on the other... .
In the finer spirits you'll find altruism outweighing egoism.
Is it not so? Is it not as I say?"

"It's true, sir; it's perfectly true. ..."

"And what, I ask you, Bardamu, what is the highest known ideal
that can excite the altruistic impulses of the more sensitive
spirit and reveal its unselfishness in such a way that it cannot
be denied?"

"Oh, sir, it's patriotism!"

"Ah, there you are, you see; it is not I who put the words into
your mouth! You understand me perfectly... . Bardamu, it's
patriotism. Patriotism and glory, which goes with it--glory
which is its emblem and its proof!"

"How true, how very true!"

"Ah, yes, our brave lads on their first experience of being under
fire immediately and spontaneously shed all secondary concepts
and false notions, particularly the sentiment of self-preservation.
Instinctively and unhesitatingly they merge with the cause of
their country, that real justification of all our existences. For
the acceptance of this truth not only is intelligence unnecessary,
Bardamu, it's a hindrance! Like all essential truths, the truth
of our duty to our country is comprehended in the heart--your
man in the street makes no mistake about that! Yet that is just
where the wicked wise man errs... ."

"Lovely words, Doctor! Almost too lovely. ... No Greek
philosopher could have put it more perfectly."

Almost affectionately Bestombes seized my two hands in his.
In tones which had become fatherly he was kind enough to add
for my benefit: "That is how I endeavour to cure my patients,
Bardamu, by electrical treatment of the body and strenuous doses
of the ethics of patriotism for the soul, by absolute injections
of revitalizing morale!"

"I understand, Doctor."

In fact, I was beginning to understand better and better. When
I had left him, I hurried away to join my revitalized companions
at Mass in the brand-new chapel, where I saw Branledore giving
proof of his moral health by treating the concierge's little
daughter to a lesson in animation behind the big door. I joined
him at once on his invitation.

That afternoon our relations came down from Paris, for the
first time since we'd been there; and after that they came each
week.

I had at last written to my mother. She was happy to have
found me again and whimpered like a bitch whose puppy has
been returned to her. No doubt she thought too she was helping
me a lot by kissing me, but she remained a good deal short of
the dog's level because she believed what they told her when they
took me away. The dog at least believes only what it knows by
sense of smell. My mother and I went for a long walk one after-
noon through the streets around the hospital, trailing along
the half-finished thoroughfares of those parts, where the lamp-
posts were still unpainted and long rows of sweating houses
showed in barred windows a hundred ragged little hangings, the
shirts of the poor; and you could hear the small noise of frying
midday grease, a storm of cheap and crackling fat. In the great
hazy desert around a town, where its luxury, ending in rottenness
and slime, is proved to be a lie, the town presents its posterior
among the dustbins to all who wish to see. There are some fact-
ories one avoids walking past; they give out every sort of smell,
some of them almost unbelievable, and the surrounding air can
stink no more. Close by, a little travelling fair moulders be-
tween two tall chimneys of unequal height, its wooden horses too
costly for the rachitic little urchins, picking their noses, who
sometimes for weeks on end long to ride them, attracted, repelled
and fascinated all at once by their abandoned air, poverty,
and the music.

All life is spent in efforts to hold at bay the reality of these
places, but it returns in its universal sadness; nothing does any
good, drinking does no good, not even red wine, as thick as ink;
the sky remains the same there, shutting you down, a huge
reservoir of soot from the suburbs.

Beneath your feet the mud drags you to fatigue, while you are
shut out from where life is by houses and factories, whose walls
are already the sides of a coffin. Now that Lola had gone com-
pletely, and Musyne too, I had nobody left. That's why in the
end I had written to my mother, so as to see some one I knew.
I was twenty years old and already had nothing but the past.
We walked through miles and miles of Sunday streets, my mother
and I. She told me the little details of her business, and what she
had heard people say about the war, what they were saying about
it in town: that the war was a sad business, "frightful" even, but
with a great deal of courage we should all get through it. For her
the dead were only victims of an accident, like at the races--
if you looked out, you didn't fall. As far as she herself was
concerned, she only regarded the war as a new sorrow, which she
tried not to think about too much. It was as if she was afraid
of this cause for sadness; it was full of sinister things which
she did not understand. She believed really that small fry like
herself were meant to suffer all the time, that that was their
role on earth, and if things had of late been going so badly, it
must surely still be due, for the most part, to their having com-
mitted a lot of faults, which had been adding up. They must have
done a lot of foolish things, without realizing it, of course;
but they were to blame nevertheless and it was really very kind
that they should be allowed to expiate their transgressions by
suffering in this way. She was an "untouchable."

This tragic and resigned optimism was her faith and formed
the basis of her character.

We both of us went along streets of empty lots in the rain; the
pavements there dip and disappear; in winter the little rows of
ash trees keep the drops of rain on their boughs, a tiny fairyland
which trembles in the wind. The road to the hospital led past
many newly built houses, some of which had names. Others were
still happily without them. "To let" was all they were called.
The war had emptied them of all their planks and workmen.
Their tenants would not even come back to them to die.

My mother cried a little as she took me back to the hospital.
She accepted the accident of my death, she not only consented to
it but wondered whether I was as resigned as she was. She believed
in Fate as implicitly as in the standard metre at the Conserva-
toire National, about which she had always spoken to me with
respect, because as a girl she had learnt that the one she used
in her mercer's shop was an exact copy of this beautiful official
rule.

Among the holdings of this broken tract of land, a few fields
here and there were still under cultivation and a peasant or two,
wedged between the new buildings, still clung to these shreds.
When there was time enough before I had to be back, Mother and I
used to go and watch them, these funny old peasants, earnestly
picking with a hoe at that soft, sacred thing which is the
earth, where the dead are put to rot but from which nevertheless
we get our daily bread. "The ground must be very hard!" said
my mother with a very puzzled air each time as she watched them.
She had no conception of any other sorts of hardship except the
one she herself endured, the hardship of life in towns; she
tried to imagine what the hardship of life in the country must
be like. That was the only curiosity I have ever known my
mother show--and it was enough to entertain her for a whole
Sunday. When she returned to town, that is what she took back
with her.

I got no more news at all of Lola, or of Musyne either, the
bitches! They kept to the safe side of all this, from which we,
cattle marked down for slaughter, were barred by a smiling but
implacable password. I had twice been sent back in this way to
the places where hostages were penned. It was only a question of
time and of waiting. The die had been cast.




BRANLEDORE, THE SERGEANT, MY NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOUR,
ENJOYED, as I have said, a persistent popularity with the nurses.
He was covered with bandages and exuded optimism. Everybody in
the wards envied him and copied his behaviour. Now that we had
become presentable and not in the least morally disgusting, we
in our turn began to be visited by distinguished society people
and representatives of officialdom in Paris. It was continually
being said in drawing-rooms that Doctor Bestombes' home for
neurotic cases was becoming a centre of intense patriotic fervour,
a rallying point, one might say. After that, our visiting days were
patronized not only by bishops but by an Italian duchess, a great
munition manufacturer, and soon by the Opera itself and stars
from the Theatre Francais. People came to admire us in our own
haunts. A beautiful young lady from the Comedie, who recited
verses marvellously, even came to my bedside and declaimed some
particularly heroic ones for my special benefit. Her wild auburn
hair (she had the complexion which goes with it) tossed astonish-
ingly the while in a way which I found intensely disturbing to my
morals if not to my morale. When this divine creature asked me
to tell her my war experiences, I provided her with so many and
such vivid and highly coloured details, that from that moment
she never took her eyes off me. Deeply moved, she asked if she
might have the most exciting of the incidents I had told her
put into rhyme by a poet friend and admirer of hers. I acceded
at once to her request.

Doctor Bestombes, on being informed of the scheme, declared him-
self emphatically in favour of it. He even granted an interview
on the subject, that very day, to a reporter and photographer
from the great Illustrated National Magazine and a picture was
taken of us all standing together, with the lovely diseuse, on the
steps of the hospital. "In these tragic days through which we are
living," declared Doctor Bestombes, who never missed a golden
opportunity, "it is the poet's highest duty to rekindle in us a
taste for the Epic. Puny compositions no longer suit the times
we live in--let us have an end to literary trifling! A new spirit
has blossomed for us in the midst of the vast and stirring din of
battle! A great patriotic renascence requires the highest flights
of literary grandeur to chronicle its feats! We must demand the
glorious thunders of an Epic Muse! For myself, I think it admir-
able that here in this hospital, which is my charge, there
should have taken place under our very eyes, unforgettably,
a sublime creative collaboration of this sort between the Poet
and one of our heroes!"

Branledore, my stable companion, whose imagination, compared
with mine, had lagged a little in this matter, and who hadn't
appeared in the photograph, was keenly and obstinately jeal-
ous. From then on he began to compete with me savagely for
the palm of heroism. He made up new stories, he surpassed
himself, no one could stop him, his exploits became deliri-
ously wonderful.

I found it hard to think of anything still more fanciful to
add to the outrageous things I'd already said. Yet no one at the
hospital gave up; they all vied with each other to see who could
invent further glorious records of the war, in which to figure
personally. We were living a tremendous saga in the skin of
fantastic characters, deep down within which we ourselves der-
isively trembled in every corner of our heart and soul. How
they would have gaped with astonishment if they had seen us
as we really were! The war was very odd indeed.

Our great Doctor Bestombes was visited by many distinguished
foreigners, scientific gentlemen who were neutral, sceptical and
curious. Inspectors from the Ministry of War pranced through
our halls, clanking swords; their soldierly lives were always being
prolonged by fresh indemnities, they felt continually rejuvenated.
They therefore weren't at all niggardly with their praises and
commendations. Everything was going splendidly; Bestombes and
his wounded heroes were a credit to the Medical Corps.

My beautiful patroness from the Comedie came back in person to
see me on one further occasion, while her pet poet was putting
the finishing touches to the recital of my exploits in rhyme. I
came across this pale and anxious young man at last, around some
corner in the corridor. The delicacy of the mechanism of his
heart, he confided in me, was, according to the doctors them-
selves, well-nigh miraculous. So they kept him far away from
the army, these doctors who take such care of fragile beings.
In return, our little bard had undertaken, at the risk of his
very health, with all his remaining spiritual energy, to forge
an Aria of Victory for our benefit--a useful instrument in
verse, unforgettable of course, like all the rest of it.

I wasn't going to complain, when he had chosen me among so
many other undeniably gallant men to be his hero. And he did
me proud, I must say. It certainly was magnificent. The recital
took place at the Comedie Francaise itself, one afternoon of so-
called poetry reading. The whole hospital had been invited.
When, magnificently gesticulating, my red-head appeared on the
stage for her tremulous recital, her waist swathed in the long, at
last voluptuous folds of the tricolour, the whole audience sprang
avidly to its feet and burst into an endless ovation. I was prepared,
it's true, but none the less I was really surprised; I could not
hide my stupefaction from those who sat next to me when I heard
my superb friend holding forth in this way, and even groaning,
so that we should not miss an iota of the dramatic value of the
episode I had made up for her. Her poet could certainly give me
points in this matter of imagination; he'd monstrously enlarged
upon mine with the help of fine-sounding rhymes and tremendous
adjectives which rolled out solemnly in the vast, admiring silence.
On coming to the climax of a period, the most fervid passage
in the piece, my actress, turning towards the box where Branledore
and I, with a few other wounded men were sitting, held out her
splendid arms and seemed to offer herself to the most heroic one
amongst us. The poet at that point was faithfully depicting a
fantastic act of gallantry which I had attributed to myself. I
don't quite remember what was supposed to be happening, but I had
certainly not stopped at half measures. Fortunately, nothing in
the way of heroism is incredible. The audience grasped the signifi-
cance of her symbolic gesture and the whole hall, stamping excited-
ly, howling with joy, turned towards us and clamoured for the
hero.

Branledore took up the whole of the front of the box and left
the rest of us nowhere; he was able, with all his bandages, to
blot us out almost completely. He did it on purpose, the bounder.

But two of the chaps managed to get themselves admired by
the mob over his head and shoulders, by climbing onto chairs
behind him. They were greeted with thunderous applause.

"But its me it's all about," I nearly shouted at that point.
"Nobody but me!" I knew my Branledore; there'd have been a
brawl in front of all these people and we should even probably
have come to blows. In the end, it was he who won the day. He
wouldn't budge an inch. There he was, all alone as he wanted
to be, acknowledging this vast acclamation. We'd been defeated
and there was nothing for it but to rush off back stage, which
we did, and there they made a great fuss over us. That was some-
thing. But our actress-inspirer was not alone in her dressing room.
By her side stood the poet, her poet, our poet. He was fond of
soldier lads too, like herself, in a charming way. They put it
to me very nicely. A bit of a party. They told me all over
again, but I took no notice at all of their kindly suggestions.
A pity that, because things might quite easily have turned out
well. They had lots of influence. I took my leave in a hurry,
foolishly annoyed. I was very young.

Let us sum up: the Air Force had snatched Lola from me, the
Argentines had taken Musyne, and finally this melodious invert
had just snooped my splendid actress friend. Alone in the world,
I left the Comedie as the last lights were being turned out in
the corridors, and by myself I returned through the night, not
taking the tram, to the hospital, a mousetrap set in the all-
pervading mud, on the obstinately ragged outskirts of the town.




JOKING APART, I CERTAINLY MUST ADMIT THAT |'D NEVER BEEN
VERY strong in the head. But now at any little thing I had a fit of
dizziness. As easily as anything I might have been under the
wheels of a bus. I was all of a tremble in the war. As for pocket
money, while I was in hospital I had only the few francs which my
mother with great difficulty spared me each week. So soon as I
could, I started to look out for a few extras here and there,
wherever I could find them. First of all, a visit to one of my
former employers struck me as propitious. I went to see him at
once.

I remembered at the right moment that I had once in a dim per-
iod of my life, worked for this Roger Puta, who kept a jeweller's
shop near the Madeleine, not long before war was declared, as
extra lad. My work with this disgusting jeweller consisted in odd
jobs, and polishing all the silver, of which there was a large
and varied selection in his shop. At certain seasons of the
year, when people bought presents, it was extremely difficult to
keep clean.

As soon as school was over (I studied hard and, because I
always failed the examinations, interminably) I would tear back
to the rear of Monsieur Puta's shop and spend two or three
hours until supper time battling with silver polish his coffeepots.

In return for my work I was fed, and well fed, in the kitchen.
Another part of my job was, before lecture hours, to take out
the dogs which guarded the shop. For all this I was paid forty
francs a month. Monsieur Puta's shop windows sparkled with a
thousand diamonds at the corner of the Rue Vignon, and each
of these diamonds cost as much as my salary for several decades.
And they are there still. When mobilization came, Puta's services
were put at the disposal of a particular Cabinet Minister, whose
automobile he drove from time to time. Besides which--and
this he did in a thoroughly efficient way--Puta made himself
exceptionally useful in providing the Minister with jewelry. High
officials speculated very successfully on the closed and closing
markets. As the war went on, more and more jewels were needed.
Monsieur Puta sometimes even had difficulty in meeting all the
orders for jewelry he received.

When overworked, Monsieur Puta's face took on a certain little
look of intelligence, because he was so tired and harassed, and
that's the only time it did. In repose his face, in spite of the
undeniable fineness of his features, formed so harmonious a portrait
of placid stupidity that it is difficult not always to remember
it and be aggravated by it.

His wife, Madame Puta, was one flesh with the till in the shop,
which she practically never left. She had been brought up to be a
jeweller's wife. It had been her parents' ambition. She knew her
duty, every bit of it. The happiness of the family depended on
the fullness of the till. It's not that she was ugly, Madame Puta;
she wasn't, she would even have been fairly pretty, like so many
other women, if she hadn't been so careful, so distrustful, that
she stopped short of good looks, as she stopped short of life,
with her too neat head of hair, her rather too ready and sudden
smile, and gestures a little too quick or a little too furtive. One
worried one's head trying to decide what there was that was too
calculating about this person and why one couldn't help feeling
irritated when she came up to one. This instinctive repulsion which
tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the
very rare consolations for being so impoverished which are given
to those of us who don't sell anything to anybody.

Niggling business cares, then, were the whole of Madame Puta's
life, as they were of Madame Herote's, but in a different way.
She belonged to them as nuns belong to the Almighty, body and
soul.

From time to time, however, my employer's wife was slightly
troubled by what was going on. She would sometimes think, for
instance, of those who had sons at the front. "How sad the war
must be, though, for people with grown-up children!"

"Think before you speak!" her husband would at once reprimand
her. Sentimentalities of this sort found him resolute and
prepared. "Would you have France undefended?"

Thus, good people, but good patriots above all else, these stoics
went to sleep every night of the war over the millions in their
shop, a French fortune.

In the brothels which Monsieur Puta occasionally visited, he
was exciting and determined to show that he knew the value of
money. Tm not an Englishman, girlie," he used to say straight
off. "I know what earning the stuff means. I'm a little French
soldier with lots of time on his hands!" That was his opening
remark. The women thought highly of him because of this sensible
way he had of taking his pleasure. Fond of the game, but no
fool--a real man. He turned his knowledge of the world to
account by transacting a little regular business with the second
in command of the brothel. This good woman believed in jewelry
and not in the stock markets. Monsieur Puta was making great
strides from the military point of view, from temporary successes
to positive gains. Quite soon he was set completely free, after I
don't know how many medical examinations. One of the keenest
joys of his existence was to contemplate and, if possible, to
fondle a pretty calf. That at least was a pleasure which put
him ahead of his wife, who lacked an interest in anything outside
her business. Given equal temperaments, there always seems
to be a little more restlessness in a man than in a woman, however
limited and hidebound he may be. Let us say that this fellow
Puta had the small beginnings of an artist. Many men, as far as
art goes, like him never get beyond a particular fondness for
pretty calves. Madame Puta was very happy not to have any
children. She so often expressed her satisfaction at this state of
affairs that eventually her husband came to mention this source
of joy of theirs to the under brothel keeper.

"But after all, somebody's children have got to go," she
answered him. "It's a duty." True enough, the war did mean
duties to be fulfilled.

The Cabinet Minister, whose car Puta drove, had no children
either; Cabinet Ministers don't.

Another extra hand did small jobs for the shop when I was
there, sometime in 1913: Jean Voireuse his name was. At night
he'd sometimes have a walking-on part at one of the smaller
theatres and in the afternoon he delivered for Puta. He too put
up with a very small salary. But he got along all right, thanks
to the Metro. He could travel almost as fast on foot as in the
Metro, to deliver his parcels. So he pocketed the price of his
ticket. The whole lot to the good. It's true his feet smelt a bit,
not to say a lot, but he knew that and used to ask me to tell
him when there were no customers in the shop, so that he could
do his accounts quietly with Madame Puta. As soon as the money
was safely in the till, he was sent away at once to join me in the
back of the shop. His feet also stood him in good stead during
the war. He was supposed to be the fastest company runner in
his battalion. He was wounded and while convalescing came to
see me at the Bicetre bastion and it was then that we both decided
to go and "touch" our old employer. No sooner said than done.
When we got to the Boulevard de la Madeleine, they had just
finished dressing the window... .

"Well, well, look who's here!" Monsieur Puta was pretty sur-
prised to see us. "I'm so glad, though. Come in, come in. You
look well, Voireuse. That's good. But you, Bardamu, you look
seedy. You're young, though. You'll get over it. You fellows are
lucky, you know, all things considered. When all's said and done,
you're living a great life out there, aren't you? Out in the open
too. You're making history, my friends, that's what I always say!
A stirring life... ."

We didn't answer Monsieur Puta at all, we let him run on
as he pleased before touching him for the money. And he went
on: "Oh, yes, the trenches aren't exactly a picnic, I'll admit that.
That's perfectly true. But it isn't a picnic here, either, you know.
You've been wounded, have you, you two? I'm worn out, quite
worn out. For two years I've been in town on night duty.
D' you know what that means? Think of it, worn out, dead beat.
God, the streets of Paris at night! Unlit, my young friends--and
having to drive a car; with the Minister in it, as often as not!
And fast too. You've no idea what it's like! One's liable to kill
oneself ten times over every night."

"Yes," broke in Madame Puta, "and sometimes he drives the
Minister's wife about, too."

"Yes, indeed--and that's not all ..."

"Terrible," we said, both together.

"And how are the dogs?" asked Voireuse politely. "What's
happened to them? Are they still taken out for exercise in
the Tuileries?"

"I've had them put away. They weren't doing me any good--
German sheepdogs! A bad thing for the shop."

"It's a great pity," said his wife. "But the new dogs we've
got now are very nice; they're Scotch terriers... . They smell,
rather. Whereas our sheepdogs--you remember them, Voireuse?
--they didn't smell at all hardly. They could be shut up in the
shop even when it had been raining...

"Yes, indeed," said M. Puta. "Not like Voireuse here, the old
scoundrel, with his feet! Do they still smell, eh, Jean? You young
scamp, you!"

"I think they do, a bit," Voireuse said.

Just at that moment some people came into the shop. "Well, I
won't keep you any longer, my friends," said Puta, anxious to
get Jean out of the shop as quickly as possible. "Get well soon,
that's the main thing. I won't ask you where you've come from.
No, National Safety before everything else, that's what I say!"

At the words National Safety, he put on a very serious look,
like he did when he paid out money... . We were being dis-
missed. Madame Puta handed us each twenty francs as we went
out. The shop was as spick and shining as a yacht, we didn't
dare cross it because of our shoes, which looked monstrous on
the fine carpet.

"Oh, look at the two of them, Roger! Aren't they funny?
They've got out of the habit--you'd think they'd walked in
something!" cried Madame Puta.

"They'll get over it," said Puta, in a cheerful and friendly
way, delighted to have got rid of us so quickly and inexpensively.
Back in the street we reflected that we shouldn't get very far
with twenty francs each. But Voireuse had another idea.

"Come with me," he said. "We'll go and call on the mother
of a chap I knew who was killed in the Meuse. I go once a week
to see his parents and tell them how their kid was killed... .
They're well off... . His mother gives me about a hundred
francs a time. They're glad to do that, they say. ... So, of
course I--"

"What should I be doing at their house? There's nothing I can
say to his mother."

"Why, you can say that you saw him too... . She'll give you
a hundred francs as well. They're very nice people, I tell you.
Not like that bastard Puta. They don't mind ..."

"All right, but are you sure she won't ask me for details?
After all, I never saw the fellow. I'd be sunk if she asked me
about him."

"No, no, it doesn't matter, you say just the same as me... .
You just say 'yes' all the time. Don't worry about that. The
woman's unhappy, don't you see, and as soon as you talk to her
about her son, she's pleased... . That's all she asks... . Doesn't
matter what you say... . There's no difficulty about it."

I found it hard to make up my mind to go, but I very much
wanted a hundred francs and these seemed to me very easy
to come by, and a godsend.

"Right you are," I agreed at last. "But I mustn't have to make
anything up, see, I warn you of that... . Promise? I'll just
say what you say and that's all. How did the chap get killed
anyway?"

"A shell hit him slap in the face, quite a big shell too, at a
place called Garance, in the Meuse country, on a river bank.
... There wasn't that much of him left to pick up, laddie... .
Just a memory, that's what he was after that... . And he was
a big feller, you know, squarely built and all that, and an athletic
sort of lad, but of course not much use against a shell. You can't
stand up to a shell!"

"That's right," I said.

"Thoroughly cleaned up, he was, I tell you. His mother, you know,
still can't believe it, even now! It's no use my saying so and
going on and on saying so... . She will have it that he may just
be missing... . It's a damn silly idea ... missing! But it's not
her fault; she's never seen a shell, she hasn't, can't under-
stand how you can pass out into thin air like that, like a fart,
and that's that--especially since it's her own son...

"Obviously."

"Anyway, I haven't been to see them for a fortnight... . But
you'll see when I come along she receives me at once, in the
drawing-room, and you know it's a fine place they've got, like
the theatre, all full of curtains and carpets and mirrors ever-
ywhere.... A hundred francs isn't much to them. ... It's like
that number of sous is to me, I should say, more or less... .
To-day she ought to be good for two hundred. She hasn't seen
me for a couple of weeks... . The servants have gold buttons
on them, you'll see ..."

We turned up the Avenue Henri-Martin and then off to the
left and after going on a little way came to a pair of iron
gates in the middle of some trees forming a private approach.
"See?" said Voireuse, when we got there. "It's like a sort of
chateau ... told you so. The father's somebody of importance
in railways, so I've heard... . He's a big bug."

"Not a stationmaster is he, by any chance?" I asked, trying to
be funny.

"Don't be a fool. There he is over there, coming along towards
us." But the elderly gentleman he pointed out to me didn't come
to us straight away; he walked around on the lawn, bent double,
talking to a soldier. We went over towards them. I recognized
the soldier. He was the same reservist chap I'd met that night
at Noirceur-sur-la-Lys, when I was out on reconnaissance. I even
remembered at once what he'd said his name was: Leon Robinson.

"D'you know that infantry bloke?" Voireuse asked me.

"Yes, I know him."

"Perhaps he's a friend of theirs. They're talking about the
mother, I expect. I hope they don't stop us going to see her...
Because she's the one who hands out the dough... ."

The old gentleman came up to us, tottering.

"My dear friend," said he to Voireuse, "it is extremely painful
for me to have to tell you that since you last came to see us, my
poor wife has succumbed to our terrible sorrow. ... On Thurs-
day we left her alone for a moment... . She asked us to. She was
crying ..."

He couldn't finish what he was saying. He turned hurriedly
and left us.

"I recognised you," I said to Robinson at that point, when the
old man was out of earshot.

"And I recognise you, too... ."

"What's happened to the old lady then?" I asked him.

"Oh, she hanged herself the day before yesterday, that's all,"
he answered. "What a blow!" he added. "She was my military god-
mother, used to send me things at the front... .Just my luck,
dammit! Think of it! The first leave I get too! I'd been looking
forward to to-day for six months."

We couldn't help being amused, Voireuse and I, at this misfortune
which had overtaken old Robinson. It certainly was a bit of
an ugly blow for him all right, but her being dead didn't give us
our two hundred francs either, and we'd come all this way ready
to spin a good yarn. At one fell swoop all parties had been done
in the eye.

"You were all set with the soft soap, eh, Robinson, you dirty
dog?" We were trying to get a rise out of him and make him mad.
"You thought you were going to squeeze them, didn't you? You
had an idea you'd get a few square meals out of them, eh? And
maybe snaffle his wife from him too, what, didn't you? But it
didn't turn out so good, did it?"

But anyway, as one couldn't stand there staring at the grass
and pulling his leg, we went off, the three of us, towards Grenelle.
We counted up all the money we had between us; it didn't come
to much. We had to get back in the evening to our respective
hospitals and depots, and there was just enough for supper for
the three of us at an estaminet, with a wee bit left over, but not
enough for galleries at a show or anything. We went along all
the same and joined the claque, but only just to have a little
drink at the bar downstairs.

"Well, I'm glad to have seen you again," Robinson told me.
"But can you beat that fellow's mother going and doing a thing
like that? And I'm damned if she doesn't go and hang herself
the very day I get back, strike me pink if she doesn't! Can't
get the woman out of my mind. ... I don't go and hang myself,
do I, because I'm bloody miserable? I'd be hanging myself
every other minute, if I did. What about you?"

"People with money," said Voireuse, "are more sensitive than
the rest of us."

He was a good-hearted chap, Voireuse. And he went on, "If I
had six francs, I'd go up to bed with that dark girl over there
by the slot machine... ."

"Go ahead," we said to him. "You can tell us later on whether
she knows her job or not... ."

However, search as we would, we hadn't got enough, including
the tip, for him to go with her. We could just pay for a coffee
all round and two cassis. Once we'd wetted our gullets, we went
out again for another walk.

Eventually we separated on the Place Vendome. Each went his own
way. None of us could see the others, and we talked low, every-
thing echoed so. No lights either; they weren't allowed.

Jean Voireuse I never saw again. Robinson I've often run
across since. Jean Voireuse was accounted for by poison gas on
the Somme. He went off and died by the sea in Brittany two years
later, at a naval sanitarium. He wrote to me twice when he first
went there, then he didn't write any more. He'd never seen the
sea before.

"You've no idea how beautiful it is," he wrote. "I do a little
bathing, it's good for my feet, but I think my voice has been
done in once and for all." That worried him a lot because his
real ambition was to be able to get back some day into the chorus
at a theatre.

Chorus work is much better paid and more artistic than plain
walking-on parts.





I WAS DROPPED BY THE QUACKS IN THE END AND WAS ABLE
TO KEEP my hide intact, but I'd been branded now for good. There
was nothing to be done about it. "Get out," they said. "You're no
longer any good at all."

"I'll go to Africa," I said to myself. "The further away I go,
the better." It was a Corsair Line boat which took me on board.
It was headed for the tropics, like all the company's other boats,
with a cargo of cotton goods, officers and colonial administrators.
So old was the boat that they'd taken away the brass plate
on the upper deck which had the date of its birth on it; that had
been so very long ago it would have given rise to apprehension,
as well as jokes, among the passengers.

They put me on this boat, then, for me to go and try to make
a new man of myself in the colonies. They wished me well and
were determined that I should make my fortune. Personally I
only wanted to get away, but as one ought always to look useful
if one isn't rich and as, anyway, my studies didn't seem to be
getting me anywhere, it couldn't very well last. I hadn't enough
money to go to the States, though. So "Africa has it," I said,
and I let myself be hounded towards the tropics where I was told
you only had not to drink too much and to behave fairly well
to make your way at once.

These prognostications made me think. There weren't many
things to be said in my favour, but it was true that I bore
myself decently and quite well. I was deferential, and always
frightened of not being in time, and careful never to get ahead
of any one in life; in fact, I was polite.

When one's been able to escape alive from a mad international
shambles, it says something after all for one's tact and discre-
tion. But about this voyage. While we stayed in European waters,
things didn't seem likely to go too badly. The passengers squatted
about the lower decks, the lavatories and the smoking room in
suspicious, drawling little groups. The whole lot of them were
soaked in amer picons and gossip from morning till night. They
belched, snoozed and shouted by turns and never seemed to
regret having left Europe at all.

Our ship was called the Admiral Bragueton. She could only have
floated on these steamy seas thanks to the paint on her hull.
So many coats of paint had been laid one on top of the other
on her hull that the Admiral Bragueton had a sort of second skin,
like an onion. We were cruising towards Africa; the real, vast
Africa of limitless forests, dangerous swamps, unbroken solitudes,
where negro kings squatted amid a network of unending rivers.
For a packet of Pilett blades they were going to barter fine long
pieces of ivory with me, and birds of bright plumage and slaves
under age. That's what I'd been promised. I was going to really
live, so they told me. I'd have nothing in common with this
Africa, innocent of all agencies, public monuments, railways
and tins of toffee. There'd be nothing of that sort. Oh, no! We
were going to see Africa in the raw, the real Dark Continent, we
bibulous passengers on board the Admiral Bragueton.

But when we were past the coast of Portugal, things began to
go wrong. One morning we woke up to find ourselves overcome
by a breathless sort of stove atmosphere, disquieting and fright-
ful. The drinking water, the sea, the air, the sheets, our own
sweat, everything was warm, sticky. From then onwards it was
impossible, by day or by night, to feel anything cool in one's hand,
under one's bottom, down one's throat, but the ice in the whiskey
served at the ship's bar. An ugly despair settled on the passengers
on board the Admiral Bragueton; they were condemned never to
leave the bar, dripping, clinging to the ventilators, grasping little
bits of ice, threatening each other after bridge and incoherently
apologizing.

It didn't take long. In this maddeningly unchanging temperature
the whole human freight of the ship clotted together in one
vast tipsiness. People walked wanly about the deck, like jellyfish
at the bottom of a pool of stagnant water. It was then that
one saw the whole of the white man's revolting nature displayed
in freedom from all constraint, under provocation and untrammel-
led; his real self as you saw it in war. This tropic stove
brought out human instincts in the same way as the heat of
August induces toads and vipers to come out and flatten themselves
against the fissured walls of prison buildings. In the cold
of Europe, under prudish northern fogs, except when slaughter
is afoot, you only glimpse the crawling cruelty of your fellow
men. But their rottenness rises to the surface as soon as they are
tickled by the hideous fevers of the tropics. It's then that the
wild unbuttoning process begins, and degradation triumphs, taking
hold of us entirely. A biological confession of weakness. As soon
as work and the cold restrain us no longer, as soon as their
stranglehold is loosened, you catch sight in the white race of
what you see on a pretty beach when the tide goes out; reality,
heavy-smelling pools of slime, the crabs, the carcasses and
scum.

And so when Portugal was passed, every one on the boat
began, ferociously, to give vent to their instincts: they were
helped in this by alcohol and that comfortable feeling, best known
to soldiers and officials in service, which comes of not having to
pay one's fare. To feel that for a month on end one is being given
food, drink and one's bed free and for nothing is enough in itself,
you'll agree, to make one rave with delight at such economy.
I, the only paying fare on board, was considered, as soon as the
fact became known, extraordinarily bad-mannered, a quite intolerable
bounder.

If, when we left Marseilles, I had had any experience of colonial
society, I should have gone on bended knee, in my unworthiness,
to ask pardon and mercy of that colonial infantry-officer, the
highest in rank on board, whom I was continually meeting everywhere
about the ship. And perhaps I should have prostrated myself
also, to make assurance doubly sure, at the feet of the oldest
civil servant. Then do you think these fantastic travellers would
have tolerated my presence among them without unpleasantness?
But, in my ignorance, my unthinking claim to be allowed to
breathe the same air as they very nearly cost me my life.
One is never fearful enough. As it was, thanks to a certain
skillfulness on my part, I lost nothing but what was left of my
self-respect.

And this is the way things happened.

Some time after passing the Canary Islands, I learnt from a
steward that I was generally looked upon as a poseur, not to
say an insolent fellow. That I was suspected of pimping, not
to mention pederasty ... of taking cocaine as well, a bit... .
But that only as a side line... . Then the notion got about
that I'd had to make my escape from France following certain
very grave offences against the law. Even so, I was only at the
beginning of my trials. It was then that I found out about the
practice usual on this line of never taking paying passengers
except with extreme circumspection, and of subjecting to as much
ragging as a new boy gets at school all passengers who did not
travel free, either on a military pass or thanks to some bureaucratic
arrangement, since French colonies actually belong, as is
well known, to the elite of the government departments.

After all, there aren't many valid motives which might induce
an unknown citizen to venture in this direction. ... I was a spy,
a suspect; a thousand reasons were found for cold-shouldering me,
the officers averting their eyes, the women with a meaning smile.
Soon the stewards themselves were encouraged by this to exchange
heavily caustic remarks behind my back. In the end no one
doubted at all that I was really the nastiest and most intolerable
dirty dog on board--the only one, in fact. It was a fine lookout.

At table, I sat next to four toothless, liverish, postal officials
from the Cameroons. At the beginning of the voyage they had
been familiar and friendly; now they didn't address a single
word to me. By tacit accord I was being sent to Coventry and
closely watched by every one. I no longer left my cabin, except
with extreme caution. The boiling atmosphere weighed down on
us as if it were solid. Naked, behind my locked door, I lay quite
still and tried to imagine what plan these devilish people might
have devised to be rid of me. I knew no one on board, yet every
one seemed to know me. My description must have become
well-known, photographed in their minds, like that of a famous
criminal published in the Press.

Without wishing it, I had begun to take the part of the neces-
sary "infamous unworthy wretch," the scorn of humanity, pointed
at through the centuries, familiar to every one, like God and the
Devil, but assuming always a different shape, so fugitive on
earth and in life as to be actually indefinable. To pick out this
wretch, to seize on him and identify him, exceptional conditions
had been needed, such as only existed on our restricted hulk.

A general moral rejoicing was imminent aboard the Admiral
Bragtieton. This time the evil-eyed one wasn't going to get away
with it. And that meant me. The event in itself was enough to
make the voyage worth while. Surrounded by these people who
chose to be my enemies, I tried as best I might to identify them
without their knowing it. To this end I spied on them with im-
punity, especially in the morning, through the porthole of my
cabin. Before breakfast, in pyjamas transparent against the
light, covered with hair from their eyebrows to their navels
and from the small of their backs to their ankles, my enemies
came out to enjoy the morning coolness or sprawled against
the side and roasted, glass in hand, threatening to vomit at
any minute--especially the captain with his bulging, bloodshot
eyes, whose liver troubled him from dawn. Regularly every
morning he asked after me from the other buffoons, wanting
to know if I'd been "flung overboard" yet. "Like a lump of
dirty phlegm!" To add point to his remarks, he spat into the
viscous sea. A hell of a joke.

The Admiral Bragueton made hardly any headway: she seemed to
drag herself along, grunting between each roll. It was an illness
now, a voyage no longer. The members of this morning council
of war, as I examined them from my coign of vantage, all seemed
to me pretty seriously stricken with some disease or other--
malaria, alcoholism, syphilis probably. Their decay, which I
could see at ten yards' range, consoled me somewhat for my own
personal worries. After all, they were beaten men, like me, these
fire eaters! They were arrogant still; that was the only difference!
The mosquitoes had already started in to suck their blood and
fill their veins with poisons which cannot be got rid of... .
Gonococci by this time were filing away their arteries. ...al-
cohol was eating up their livers... . The sun was cracking their
kidneys... . Crabs had fastened in their hair and eczema
covered their stomachs... .The blazing light would eventually
dim their retinas. ... In a little while what would they have
left? A few scraps of brain... . What could they do with that?
I ask you ... where they were bound for. Commit suicide? It
wouldn't be of any use to them where they were going except to
help them commit suicide, in the places they were headed for.
Whatever you may say, it's no fun growing old in countries
where there are no distractions... . Where one has to look
at oneself in a glass which is itself decaying, filming over... .
You rot quick enough in green places, especially when it's hid-
eously hot.

The North will at least preserve your flesh for you; Northern-
ers are pale for good and all. There's very little difference
between a dead Swede and a young man who's had a bad night.
But the Colonial is full of maggots the day after he gets off the
boat. That's just what these infinitely industrious larva have
been waiting for, and they won't let him go till long after life
is over. A crawling carcass, that's all he is.

We'd eight more days at sea before touching at Bragamance, our
first taste of the promised land. I felt as if I were living in a
case of high explosives. I hardly ate at all, so as not to have to
meet these people in the saloon, or cross their decks in daylight.
I didn't open my mouth. I was never seen walking about. It was
difficult to be as small as I was and still remain on the boat.

My cabin steward, who was a family man, kindly informed me
that our fine upstanding colonial officers had sworn, with glasses
raised, to slap my face at the first opportunity and then to throw
me overboard. When I asked him why, he said he hadn't any idea
and himself asked me what I had done for things to come to such
a pitch. We were left in doubt on this point. ... It might go
on a long time. I was a cad, that's all there was to it.

They'd never again get me to travel in the company of people
who were so hard to please. They had so little to do, what's more,
shut up alone with themselves for a whole month, that it needed
very little to make them angry. If it comes to that, one may as
well realize that in everyday life at least a hundred people thirst
for your miserable life in the course of a single ordinary day--
all those people, for instance, whom you annoy by being ahead
of them in the Underground queue; all the people who pass by
your apartment and haven't one of their own; all those who
would like you to hurry up and come out of the lavatory so that
they can go in there themselves; your children too, and a host
of others. It goes on all the time. One gets accustomed to it. On
board ship this friction is more easily noticeable, so it's more
annoying.

In this bubbling stewpot, the grease exuded by these human
ingredients becomes concentrated; a presentiment of the frightful
loneliness which in the colony is going soon to engulf them
and their hopes for the future, makes them groan already like
dying men. They clutch, bite, scratch, ooze. My importance on
board increased prodigiously from one day to the next. My rare
appearances in the saloon, however furtive and silent I strove to
make them, had now become events of real significance. As soon
as I came in, a hundred passengers gave a single start and began
whispering.

The colonial officers at the captain's table, primed with aper-
itifs, the tax collectors, and the governesses from the Congo
(of which we had a fine selection on board the Admiral Brague-
ton) had endowed me with an infernal importance by jumping from
malicious suppositions to slanderous conclusions. When we'd
embarked at Marseilles, I was little more than an insignificant
dreamer: now, owing to the venomous concentration of these
alcoholic males and unsatisfied females, I had been brought
unrecognisably and unpleasantly into the limelight.

The captain, a shady fellow, cunning and covered with warts,
who when the voyage began had gladly enough shaken me by
the hand, now when we met seemed no longer to recognise me;
he avoided me as one avoids a wanted man actually guilty of
some crime... . Guilty of what? When there's no risk attached
to hating people, stupidity quickly discovers conviction; motives
spring up ready-made.

As far as I could make out in the serried ranks of antagonism
pitted against me, there was one young governess who led the
feminine element of the cabal. She was going back to the Congo
to die--at least, I hope so. She was hardly ever separated from
the colonial officers, resplendent in their gorgeous tunics and
armed with the oath they had sworn that they would annihilate me,
as if I were some infectious insect, long before our next port
of call. It was widely debated whether I should be more unplea-
sant flattened out than I was alive and kicking. In fact, I was a
source of entertainment. This young lady spurred them on, invok-
ed the wrath of Heaven on my head, wouldn't rest till I had
been picked up in pieces, until I'd paid the penalty for my
imaginary offence in full, been punished indeed for existing and,
thoroughly beaten, bruised and bleeding, had begged for mercy
under a rain of blows and kicks from the fine fellows whose
pluck and muscular development she was aching to admire. Deep
down in her wasted insides, she was stirred at the thought of
some magnificently blood-bespattered scene. The idea of it was
as exciting to her as that of being raped by a gorilla. Time was
slipping by and it is unwise to keep the arena crowd waiting. I
was the victim. The whole ship clamoured for my blood, seemed
to tremble from keel to rigging in expectation.

The sea kept us fast in this floating circus. Even the stokers
knew what was afoot. And as there were only three days more be-
fore we berthed--three decisive days--several executioners vol-
unteered their services. And the more I avoided the fracas, the
more aggressive and threatening towards me every one became.
Those about to perform the sacrifice were getting their hand in.
My cabin was sandwiched between two other cabins at the end of a
cul-de-sac. I had escaped hitherto by the skin of my teeth, but it
was becoming downright dangerous for me to go along to the lava-
tories. So now that there were only three more days, I decided
definitely to renounce all Nature's needs. The porthole was enough
for me. A weight of hatred and boredom bore down on everything
around me. It certainly is an unbelievable boredom on board a
ship--a cosmic boredom. It covers the whole sea, the boat and
the sky. Even reasonable people might be driven to wild excesses
by it, let alone these unreal savages.

A sacrifice! A sacrifice! I wasn't going to be allowed to escape
it. Things came to a head one evening after supper, when I'd
felt too hungry to resist going to the saloon. I'd kept my nose
down over my plate, not daring even to bring out a handkerchief
to mop the sweat from my face. Nobody has ever eaten more
unobtrusively than I did. A small regular throb came up under
one's seat from the engines as one ate. My neighbours at the
table must have known what had been decided about me, because
they began, to my surprise, to talk to me about duels and sword-
play, pleasantly and at length, and to ask me questions. At that
moment too, the Congo governess--the one whose breath smelt
so strongly--entered the lounge. I had time to notice that she
was wearing a spectacular lace evening gown; with nervous
haste she went over to the piano and played, if one can call it
playing, a number of airs, all of which she left unfinished. The
atmosphere had become extremely sinister and tense.

Like a shot, I bolted back towards the refuge of my cabin. I'd
almost reached it when one of the officers, the greatest swaggerer
and the toughest of them all, barred my way resolutely, but without
violence. "Let's go up on deck," he enjoined me. We were there
in no time. He was wearing for the occasion his most goldbraided
kepi, and had buttoned up his tunic from top to bottom, which
he hadn't ever done since the voyage began. So we were to have
full dramatic ceremonial, evidently. I didn't amount to much;
my heart was thumping somewhere about the level of my navel.

Such unusually formal prelimineries suggested a slow and
painful execution of sentence. The man seemed to me like a
further fragment of the war confronting me again, purposeful,
murderous, inescapable.

At the same time, drawn up behind him, very much on the
alert, four junior officers blocked the companionway, forming an
escort to Fate.

There was no way out. The harangue which followed must have
been meticulously thought out. "Sir, you are in the presence
of Captain Fremizon of the Colonial Service. In the name of my
fellow officers and of the passengers on this ship, all of whom
are justly indignant at your outrageous behaviour, I have the
honour to demand an explanation from you. We consider intoler-
able certain remarks which you have made about us since you came
aboard at Marseilles. Now is the time for you, sir, to air your
grievances aloud, to repeat openly the shameful things you have
been whispering these past three weeks--to say, in fact, whatever
you may have to say for yourself!"

I was immensely relieved when I heard these words. I had feared
a summary execution of some sort, but they offered me, in that
the captain was talking to me, a means of escape. I seized this
ray of hope. Any chance of cowardice is a wonderful possibility
of salvation if you know what you're up to. That's what I thought.
Never quibble about how to escape being gutted, nor lose time
in puzzling out the reasons for a persecution directed against
oneself. Escape in itself is enough, if one is wise.

"Captain!" I said to him in as confident a voice as I could
just then muster. "You are making an extraordinary mistake!
Me of all people! And you, Captain! How can such disloyal
feelings be attributed to me? Really, it is too unfair! The
very thought of it dumbfounds me... . How can they? I, who but
the other day was fighting for our country! I, whose blood with
your own has flowed in so many unforgettable battles! What
an injustice you are heaping upon me, Captain!"

Then, addressing myself to the whole group, I went on: "Gen-
tlemen, what is this appalling slander which has deceived you
all? How can you have dreamt that I, your brother in arms,
could ever descend to spreading monstrous rumours about gallant
officers of the army! It is too much; really it is too much... .
And that I should choose to do so at just such a time when, brave
men one and all, they're going out again to guard, loyally to
guard, our immortal Colonial Empire! That Empire in whose
service the foremost soldiers of our race have covered themselves
with eternal glory--the Mangins, the Faidherbes, the Gallienis!
Oh, Captain, that such things should be said of man!"

I broke off and waited. I hoped to have impressed them. Fortu-
nately I had, for one short moment. With no loss of time, there-
fore, I took advantage of this truce and their confusion and,
going right up to him, seized both his hands with a fine show of
emotion.

I felt better with his hands firmly clasped in mine. Never let-
ting go of them, I went on volubly explaining my position, and
while I assured him that he'd been entirely in the right, I said
that we must make a fresh start, he and I, this time getting
things quite straight between us. That my understandable if fool-
ish timidity was alone responsible for this fantastic dislike that
had been taken to me. That my behaviour might indeed very well
have been considered extraordinary and arrogant by this group of
ladies and gentlemen, "my gallant and charming fellow travellers.
... Luckily they were people of character and understanding... .
And many of the ladies were marvellously musical, an ornament
to the society on board!" I made an honourable and profuse apo-
logy and wound up by begging them to admit me without the least
suspicion or reserve into the heart of their happy company of
patriots and brothers. ... I wished them to like me henceforth
and always. ... I didn't let go of his hands, of course, but I
redoubled my eloquence.

When not actually busy killing, your soldier's a child. He's
easily amused. Unaccustomed to thought, as soon as you talk to
him he has to make terrific efforts in order to understand what
you're saying. Captain Fremizon wasn't engaged in murdering
me, he wasn't drinking either, he wasn't doing anything with his
hands, or with his feet: he was merely endeavouring to think. It
was vastly too much for him. Actually I had him mentally overcome.

Bit by bit, while this humiliating trial lasted, I felt my self-
respect, which was about to leave me anyway, slipping still
further from me, then going completely and at last definitely
gone, as if officially removed. Say what you like, it's a very
pleasant sensation. After this incident I've always felt infinitely
free and light; morally, I mean, of course. Perhaps fear is what
you need most often in life to get you out of a hole. Personally,
since that day I've never myself wanted any other weapon, or
any other virtues.

The captain was at a loss, and his fellow officers, who had
come there for the purpose of smashing me and scattering my
teeth about the deck, now had to put up with mere words scattered
in the air instead. The civilians, who'd also come rushing at the
news of an execution, glowered unpleasantly. As I wasn't quite
certain of what I was saying (except that I stuck for all I was
worth to the lyric note) I gazed straight ahead at a given spot
in the soft fog, through which the Admiral Bragueton was wend-
ing her way, wheezing and slobbering at every stroke of her
propeller. At last, to conclude my speech, I risked waving one
arm above my head, and letting go of one of the captain's hands
to do so, only one, I came to an impressive close:

"Among soldiers and gentlemen, should any misunderstanding
be allowed to exist? Long live France, then, in God's name! Vive
la France!" It was Sergeant Branledore's gambit. And it worked on
this occasion too. That was the only time my country saved my
life; till then, it had been quite the reverse. I noticed my audience
hesitate for a second; but after all, it's very difficult for an of-
ficer to strike a civilian in public, however ill-disposed towards
him he may feel, just when the other is shouting "Vive la France!"
as loudly as I had then. Their hesitation saved me.

I grasped two arms at random in the group of officers and in-
vited everybody to come along to the bar and drink to my health
and our reconciliation. The gallant fellows hung back only for
a moment; then we drank for two hours. But the females on board
watched us silently and in slowly growing disappointment. Through
the portholes I watched the piano-playing governess obstinately
prowling up and down, with several lady passengers, like a hyena.
They guessed, the bitches, that I'd slipped out of the ambush
by a ruse, and they meant to catch me again on the rebound. All
this while, we men went on drinking under the useless and mad-
dening electric fan which, since we left the Canaries, had
feebly churned an air like warm cotton. But I had to keep in
form, I had to start the ball rolling again, so as to please my
new friends, making things easy and pleasant for them. I never ran
dry of patriotic admiration, wary of slipping; I went on and on
asking these heroes one after another for more and more stories
of colonial feats of arms. War stories are like the dirty variety;
they never fail to please all soldiers of all nationalities. What
you really need to make a sort of peace with these men, whether
they're officers or privates--a fragile armistice it's true, but
nevertheless very valuable--is, whatever happens, to let them
expand and bask in idiotic self-glorification. Intelligent vanity
does not exist. It's merely an instinct. Yet there is no man who
is not vain before all else. One human being can only tolerate
another human being and rather like him, if he plays the part
of an admiring doormat. I didn't have to do any mental hard work
with these military gentlemen. It was enough never to stop seem-
ing amazed and delighted. And it's easy to ask for more and
more war stories. My young friends simply bristled with them.
I could have imagined myself back in the good old hospital
days. At the end of each of their anecdotes I did not forget
to show my appreciation, in the way I'd learned from Branledore,
with a fine phrase. "That's something that deserves to go down
to History!" As a formula, it's as good as they make them. The
circle I had so stealthily squeezed my way into began bit by bit
to consider me an interesting fellow. They began to say many
things about the war as wildly absurd as those I had heard in
the old days and later invented myself, when competing imagina-
tively with my mates in hospital. Of course, their setting was
different; their fantasies wandered at large in the forests of
the Congo instead of in the Vosges or in Flanders.

My good Captain Fremizon, the one who earlier had assumed
the task of purifying the boat of my disgusting presence, began,
now that he had noticed my habit of listening more attentively
than any one else, to show me the more charming side of his
character. His arteries seemed to be softened by my novel express-
ions of admiration, his vision cleared, those bulging, bloodshot
eyes that betrayed the confirmed toper finally even sparkled,
despite his brutishness, and the few little doubts as to his own
worth which may have assailed him still whenever he was very
depressed, were now adorably dispersed for a time by my marvel-
lously intelligent and pertinent comments.

By Gad, I was the fellow to make a party go! They slapped
their thighs in approbation. No one else could make life so
enjoyable in spite of the moist horror of these latitudes. The
point is that I was listening beautifully.

While we were carrying on in this way, the Admiral Bragueton
began to go slower still; she slowed down in her own juice. Not
a breath of air stirred about us; we were hugging the coast and
doing it so slowly that we seemed to be shifting through molasses.

Syrupy too was the sky above the decks, nothing but a black,
deep paste which I gazed at hungrily. To get back into the night
was what I wanted most of all, to get back there, sweating and
groaning or any way, it didn't matter how. Fremizon never
stopped talking. Land seemed quite close but my plan of escape
filled me with deep anxiety... . Little by little our talk ceased
to be military and became jaunty, then frankly smutty, and at
last so downright dirty that it was hard to know how to keep it
going. One after another my guests gave up the attempt and fell
asleep, and were shaken by snores, unpleasant slumber grating
in their noses. Now or never was the time to get away. It's no
good wasting these intervals of kindness which nature somehow
manages to impose on even the most vicious and aggressive of
earthly creatures.

We were at anchor just then, not far from land. All you could
see of it were a few lanterns waving along the shore.

Very quickly a hundred swaying canoes full of chattering black
men came alongside. These natives swarmed all over the ship,
offering their services. In no time I was at the gangway with the
few bundles into which I had furtively made up my things, and
streaked off behind one of the boatmen, whose face and move-
ments in the darkness I could hardly see. At the bottom, down
by the water slapping the ship's side, I wondered where we were
going.

"Where are we?" I asked him.

"At Bambola-Fort-Gono," the shadow answered.

We pushed off into the open, paddling hard. I helped him, so
as to increase our speed.

In my flight I caught one more glimpse of my dangerous
companions on board. Under the lights between decks I could
see them, overcome, comatose and gastric, still twitching and
grunting in their sleep. Bloatedly sprawling, they all looked the
same now, all these officers, civil servants, engineers and traders,
mingling, swarthy, spotted, guzzling. A dog looks like a wolf
when he's asleep.

In a few minutes I had reached land once more and had found
the night as well. It was thickest under the trees and there for
me too, beyond the night itself, was all the complicity of silence.




OVERTOPPING THE WHOLE OF THIS COLONY OF BAMBOLA
BRAGAMANCE and everybody in it, was the governor. The soldiers
and civil servants under him hardly dared to breathe when he
deigned tocast his eye upon them.

Far beneath these notables the resident traders seemed to
thieve and prosper more easily than in Europe. Not a coconut
or a groundnut throughout the whole territory escaped their
depredations. The civil servants realized, as they grew more tired
and ill, that they'd been done in the eye when they were sent
out here and weren't getting anything after all except braid, and
forms to fill up, and practically no salary for it all. So they
glowered at the traders. The military group, which had fallen
even lower than the other two, merely existed on a diet of im-
perial prestige, helped down with a lot of quinine and miles and
miles of regulations.

Understandably enough, from continually waiting for the barometer
to drop, everybody was becoming more and more obtuse.And so end-
less petty quarrels, both personal and between groups, were al-
ways in progress between the military and the civil servants,
between these latter and the traders, and between both of
them joined in temporary alliance against the former, and then
between all three against the black man and finally between the
black men themselves. Such vital energy as was not sapped
by malaria, thirst and the heat of the sun was consumed by hatreds
so bitter and insistent that many of the residents used to die in
their tracks, poisoned by themselves, like scorpions.

This state of virulent chaos, however, was encircled by a serried
cordon of police, like crabs in a bucket. It was in vain that the
officials whined; the governor could always recruit as many
shabby levies as he needed to keep his colony in order, as many
as there were defaulting Negroes driven by penury in their thou-
sands towards the coast, bankrupted by the traders and searching
for a crust to eat. These recruits were taught the law and how
to admire the governor. As for the governor, he seemed to parade
all the gold of his income on his uniform; with the sun shining
on it, it was incredible, and that not counting the plumes on his
helmet.

The governor had a supply of Vichy sent out to him every year
and read nothing but the Official Gazette. A great number of
the Civil Service servants had lived in hopes that one day he'd
go to bed with their wives, but the governor had no liking for
women. He had no liking for anything. Through each succeeding
yellow-fever epidemic the governor lived on as if by magic, while
many of the people who longed to help bury him died like flies
at the first wave of infection.

It was recalled that one fourteenth of July, when he was re-
viewing his troops at the Residency, curvetting about at the
head of his guard of Spahis, alone before a devilish great flag,
a certain sergeant, no doubt driven out of his right mind by
fever, sprang out in front of his horse and shouted, "Get back,
you dirty bastard!" It appears that the governor was much af-
fected by this sort of attempt on his person, which anyway was
never satisfactorily cleared up.

It is hard to take a reasonable view of people and things in
the tropics because of the aura of colour which envelops them.
Things and colours are in a haze. A little sardine tin lying open
at noon in the middle of the road throws off so many different
reflections that in one's eyes it takes on the importance of an
accident. You've got to be careful. It's not only the human be-
ings who are hysterical down in those parts; things get involv-
ed in it too. Life doesn't become even barely tolerable until
nightfall and even then the darkness is seized almost at once by
swarms of mosquitoes,--not one or two or several score, but
billions of them. To pull through under such conditions becomes
a veritable feat of self-preservation. A carnival by day, a caul-
dron at night, it's the war again in petto.

When the bungalow one sleeps in has at last become silent, and
the air indoors is almost fit to breathe, the ants set to on its
foundations, busily engaged night after night, the little brutes,
in eating away your supports from under you. Then let a gale
sweep down on this treacherous fretwork and whole streets
will be puffed away.

This place I had come to, Fort-Gono, the flimsy capital of
Bragamance Territory, was perched between the sea and the
jungle, but could boast nevertheless of a whole array of banks,
brothels, cafes and sidewalks, not to mention Faidherbe Square
and the Boulevard Bugeaud, where one could take a stroll, and,
just to make it quite the little metropolis, even a recruiting
station; in all, a group of glaring buildings set in the midst
of rough cliffs of larva which generations of energetic whites
had scaled.

The military element round about five o'clock used to growl over
its aperitifs, which as a matter of fact when I arrived had just
been put up in price. A consumers' delegation was going to the
governor to ask for an injunction to restrain this profiteering by
the liquor merchants in the cassis and absinthe markets. According
to certain old stagers, colonizing was becoming more and more
arduous on account of ice being available. The introduction of
ice into our colonies was, to be sure, a signal for a loss of vi-
tality among the colonizers. Thenceforward, accustomed never to
be without his iced drinks, the colonial administrator must needs
give up attempting to overcome the climate by his own stoicism
alone. Let us remember that the Faidherbes, the Stanleys and
the Marchands allowed their thoughts to dwell on nothing more
appetizing than lukewarm, muddy beer, wine or water, which they
drank year after year without complaining. There you have it--
that's the way you lose your colonies.

Lots of other things I learnt too beneath the palms, which for
their part flourished--irritatingly enough thanks to their own
sap--along those streets of fragile houses. It was only this
startling note of crude green which prevented the place from
looking like the gloomier outskirts of Paris.

When night had fallen the native hubbub got well under way
amid clouds of busy mosquitoes primed with yellow fever.
Sudanese ladies offered the passer-by whatever joys their
skirts concealed. For a very reasonable sum whole families were
at your disposal for an hour or two. I should have liked to
flit from sex to sex in this way, but I simply had no time to
lose in making up my mind to look somewhere for a job.

The general manager of the Porduriere Company of Little Togo
was looking, they told me, for some newcomer to take charge
of one of his trading posts in the interior. Without losing
another moment I went and offered him my own incompetent but
eager services. It wasn't a particularly charming reception that
the general manager gave me. He was a maniac, as a matter of
fact, living not far from the Government House in a very large
bungalow, built on piles and thatched. Before even so much as
looking at me he asked, quite savagely, a few questions about my
past and then, slightly mollified by my very naive answers, be-
came moderately indulgent in his scorn for me. But he still
didn't think it worth while to offer me a seat.

"It seems from your papers that you know a little about
medicine?" he remarked.

I answered that I had as a matter of fact studied medicine a
little.

"You'll find it useful," he said. "Have a whiskey?"

I didn't drink.

"Will you smoke?"

I again said no. Such abstinence surprised him. He made a face.

"I don't at all like my men not smoking or drinking....Are you
a bugger, by any chance? No? That's a pity. That sort don't
steal as much as the others. It's a thing I've noticed from ex-
perience. They get attached ... Anyway," he had the goodness
to amend, "generally speaking, I seem to have noticed that
particular characteristic of homosexuals, a point in their favour.
... Well, perhaps you'll prove just the reverse!" Then, changing
the subject, "You're feeling the heat, are you? You'll get used
to it! You'll have to, anyway. How was the journey out?"

"Unpleasant," I told him.

"Well, my friend, you haven't seen anything yet: you'll have
plenty more to say about this country when you've spent a year
at Bikomimbo, where I'm sending you to take the place of that
other rogue."

His negress, squatting by the table, was fiddling with her
toenails, picking at them with a little piece of wood.
"Get out, you lump!" her master shouted. "Go and call my
boy. And get me some ice at the same time!"

The boy who'd been sent for took a long time to arrive. When
he did come, the manager, furious because he'd been kept waiting,
sprang to his feet and greeted his servant with a couple of
terrific slaps in the face and two kicks in the pit of the stomach
which could be heard for miles.

'They'll drive me crazy, that's what'll happen," the manager
groaned. And he fell back into his armchair, which was covered
with some dirty, shapeless yellow material.

"I say, old man," he turned to me, suddenly kindly and familiar,
as if relieved by the brutality he had just shown, "pass me my
quinine and the water jug, will you? There on the table....
I oughtn't to let myself get worked up.... It's stupid to give
way to one's temper like that."

From his house we overlooked the river harbour, shimmering
below us through dust so thick and solid that one could hear the
sounds of its chaotic activity more clearly than one could make
out the details of it. On the shore, strings of Negroes were un-
loading, bale after bale, the never-emptied holds, clambering
up flimsy, swaying gangplanks with great, full baskets balanced
on their heads, amid curses, like some sort of upright ants.
They came and went, jogging in single files through a red
haze. Among these forms at work some bore an extra little
black dot on their backs: they were the mothers who had also
come to carry sacks of dates, with their children as an added
burden. I wonder whether ants can do as much.

"It's like Sunday all the time here, don't you think?" the
manager continued humourously. "It's gay! And bright. The
females always naked, you'll have noticed. And not bad-looking
females either, eh? It seems quite odd when one first gets here
from Paris, doesn't it? And what about us? Wearing white drill
all the time! As if we were at the seaside on holiday....Pret-
ty we look, don't you think? All dressed up for First Communion.
...It's one long holiday here you know--a real sweltering
Empire Day! And it's like that all the way to the Sahara!
Think of it ..."

Then he stopped talking, sighed, groaned, said a filthy word
two or three times, mopped his face and again picked up the
conversation.

"Out there where the company's sending you, it's the thick of
the bush, and damp.... It's a ten days' journey from here....
First by sea. Then up the river. It's a bright red river, you'll
find. ... On the other side are the Spaniards.... Between
ourselves, the chap you're replacing at this dump's an absolute
bastard. ... I mean to say, we simply can't make the damn
man send in his accounts. Can't do it. Note after note I send
him, but it's no good. ... A man's not honest long when he's
alone by himself.... You'll see.... You'll find that out
too.... He's ill, he says.... Fancy that! Ill! Dammit, I'm ill
myself. What's he mean--ill? We're all ill. You too, you'll get
ill before very long. That's no excuse! We don't give a damn if
he's ill or not. What does the company mind about that? As soon
as you get there, be sure to make an inventory of what he's got
left. ... He has enough food at that store to last three months,
and enough trade stock for at least a year. ... You won't be
short! Above all, don't start out at night. Be careful. He'll send
his blacks to meet you on the coast and they'll tip you overboard,
maybe.... He'll have been at them, probably.... They're as
shifty as he is. By God yes.... He'll have slipped them a word or
two about you all right.... That sort of thing happens, you
know, out here.... And don't forget to take your quinine with
you, your own quinine; get it before you go! He's quite capable
of having put something into his for you...."

The general manager was through giving me advice; he got up
to say good-bye. The ceiling above us, made of canvas, seemed
to weigh a couple of hundred tons at least, it kept the heat down
on us so. Both our faces expressed our irritation at the heat.
It was enough to kill you there and then. He added:

"It probably isn't worth while meeting again before you go,
Bardamu. Everything's so tiring out here. Oh, I don't know, 1'11
go down and see you're O.K., before you start, all the same....
We'll write to you when you're out there. There's a mail once a
month.... The runner starts from here. Well, good luck!"

He disappeared into the shadow between his sun helmet and
his vest. You could see the tendons in his neck quite distinctly,
knotted like two fingers sticking out against the back of his head.
He turned back once more.

"Don't forget to tell the other bloke to come down here at
once....Tell him I've a word or two to say to him--and not
to waste time on the way. Bah! The blighter! Hope at least he
doesn't die en route.... That would be a pity. A great pity!
The dirty swine."

One of his blacks walked before me with a large lantern, tak-
ing me to the place I was to stop at, before setting out for this
lovely Bikomimbo of my dreams.

We went along streets in which every one seemed to have come
out for a stroll after dusk. The night, hammered by gongs, was
everywhere pierced by dry incoherent voices singing, like hiccups
--that great black night of hot countries with its brutal pulse
beating, like a tom-tom, always too fast.

My young guide slid nimbly along on naked feet. There must
have been Europeans in the thickets; one could hear them
snooping around, white men's voices recognizable at once, im-
patient and aggressive. The bats all the time came flapping and
swerving through the swarms of insects which our light attracted
around us as we passed. Each leaf of every tree must have
hidden a cricket, judging by the deafening din they were all of
them making.

We were stopped at a cross-roads halfway up a slope by a group
of native soldiers arguing around a coffin which lay on the ground
covered by the large folds of a tricolour flag.

A man had died in hospital and they weren't at all certain
where to bury him. Orders had been vague. One or two of them
wanted to bury him in a field somewhere down the hill, others
were in favour of a patch right up at the top of the incline. A
decision had to be made. So the boy and I said our say in the
matter.

Finally they picked on the lower burial ground in preference
to the higher, because it meant going downhill. Further along our
road we met three of those little white youngsters of the sort
that in Europe spends its free afternoons watching rugby matches,
excitable, keen and pasty-faced lookers-on. Out here they be-
longed, as I did, to the Porduriere Company; they very kindly
showed me the way to the unfinished house where, for the moment,
I was to find my camp bed.

We went. It was an absolutely empty building except for one
or two cooking utensils and my so-called bed. As soon as I had
stretched myself out on this quivering, netlike contraption, a
score of bats came out of the corners and swooped noisily back
and forth, like so many swishing fans, over my uneasy rest.

My little black guide came back once more to offer me the de-
lights of his person. He was disappointed when I explained that
I really wasn't feeling up to it that evening and immediately
suggested introducing his sister to me. I would have been cur-
ious to know how, on such a night, he would have set about
finding his sister.

Quite close by, the village tom-tom with little strokes chipped
one's patience into tiny fragments. A horde of diligent mosquitoes
at once took possession of my thighs and I didn't dare set foot
to the ground again because of the scorpions and poisonous reptiles
which I was sure were out on their abominable hunt for victims.
Certainly they had their choice of rats. I could hear them gnawing
away at everything that can be gnawed; I could hear them in the
walls, under the floor, about to flop from the ceiling.

At last the moon came out and things were a little more calm
in the hut. It wasn't, in fact, much fun being out in the colonies.

Next morning came eventually, a baking horror. An utter long-
ing to return to Europe filled me, body and soul. Only lack of
money prevented my escape. But that was enough. And I only
had one more week to spend in Fort-Gono before taking over my
post at Bikomimbo, of which I'd heard so much.

The largest building in Fort-Gono, after the Governor's Palace,
was the hospital. I came across it everywhere I went: I couldn't
walk a hundred yards through the town without coming up against
one or other of its wards, smelling distantly of carbolic. Some-
times I wandered down to the quay-side and stood there watching
my unhealthy little colleagues at work; the Porduriere Company
used to bring them over from France in droves. An aggressive
haste seemed to possess them to keep up the loading and un-
loading of one cargo after another without pause. "Harbour
duties cost such a devil of a lot," they kept repeating, as
sincerely put out as if it were their own money which was be-
ing spent.

They harassed the black dock hands quite frantically. They
were full of zeal, no one could dream of denying that, and they
were just as vacant and bloody-minded as they were zealous.
Employees worth their weight in gold, in fact, carefully picked
men, as enthusiastic and unreasoning as one could wish. Sons
such as my mother would have liked to bear, dead keen on their
jobs. What would she not have given to have had just one such
son, of whom she could be truly proud before all the world, a
really legitimate son!

Gutless little creatures, they had come out to the West Coast
to offer up to their employers their selves, their blood, their
lives, their youth, suffering martyrdoms for twenty-two francs
a day (minus board and lodging), and pleased, yes, quite pleased
to carry on until the ten millionth mosquito had sucked from
them their last red corpuscle.

The colony makes little clerks fat or it makes them thin, but
it doesn't let them go. There are only two ways to die under the
sun,--the fat way and the lean. There is no other. One could
choose which one preferred if it didn't simply depend on one's
make-up whether one dies fat or with only skin on one's bones.
The general manager up there on his red cliff top, now writhing
diabolically with his black woman under that canvas roof, with
its hundred thousand pounds' weight of sunshine, he too would
not escape disaster. His was the thin type. He was putting up a
show against it, that's all. He seemed to be able to cope with the
climate. But that was a vain illusion. In reality, he was burning
away to nothing even more rapidly than every one else.

It was said that he had a magnificent embezzlement scheme
which would make his fortune in a couple of years. But he would
never have time to make his plan come true--even if he set him-
self to defraud the company all day and all night. Twenty-two
general managers of the company before him had all tried to make
their fortunes, each with his own pet system, like at roulette.
All that was as clear as daylight to the shareholders, who were
keeping their eye on him down there, and to others who watched
from further afield, from the Rue Moncey, in Paris, and it only
made them smile. The whole thing was childish. The shareholders
were themselves greater bandits than any one. They were aware
too that their general manager was syphilitic and terribly hard
pressed by the heat of the tropics, and that he swallowed enough
quinine and bismuth to burst his eardrums and enough arsenic to
make all his teeth drop out. In the company's books the general
manager's salaried months were numbered, numbered like the
days of a fattening pig.

My little fellow clerks exchanged no ideas between themselves
- only fixed formulas, baked hard and rebaked like little turds
of thought. "Pack up your troubles," they'd say. Or, "Keep the
ball rolling." "The manager's a bastard." "Kicking niggers is the
White Man's Burden."

In the evening, after work was finally over, we met again over
aperitifs with the Assistant Inspector of Works, M. Tandernot,
from La Rochelle. Tandernot only mixed with the traders so as
to be stood drinks. He had to bow to this defeat; he was entirely
broke. His position was as low as it well could be in the colonial
hierarchy, his job being to oversee the making of roads through
the thick of the forest. The natives worked on these roads; under
the lash of his levies, of course. But as no white man ever used
the new roads which Tandernot built, and as for their part the
natives preferred their own forest tracks, so as to make them-
selves as small as possible and avoid taxation, and as in any
case Tandernot's roads didn't really lead anywhere, they used
to get overgrown and vanish very rapidly; from one month to the
next, as a matter of fact.

"Believe me or not, last year I lost one hundred and twenty-two
kilometres!" this fantastic pioneer would vouchsafe, quite readily,
about his roads.

I discovered one solitary conceit in Tandernot while I was
there, a humble boast: which was that he was the only European
who could catch cold in Bragamance when it was 107°F. in the
shade. This odd talent consoled him for many things. "I've gone
and caught cold again, like a dam' fool," he'd say over his
aperitif. "It doesn't happen to any one but me." The rest of our
silly little group would exclaim, "What an extraordinary chap old
Tandernot is!"

And that was better than nothing; there was a certain satisfaction
to be got out of it. In this matter of vanity, anything is better
than nothing.

Another form of amusement in this group of the Porduriere
Company's little employees was to organize fever competitions.
It wasn't difficult, but you could keep the contest going for days
on end, so it whiled away the time all right. When evening came
the fever almost every day came with it, and one took one's
temperature. "Hey, look, mine's up to 101!"--"What the hell,
I can get up to 102 as easy as anything."

These recordings were entirely accurate and usual, as a matter
of fact. By the light of the hurricane lamps we compared our
thermometers. The winner triumphed all of a tremble. "I can't
piss now I'm sweating so," the most emaciated of our number
truthfully remarked. He was a slim little fellow from the
Pyrenees. The champion at this feverish game, who had come out
there, he told me, to escape from a seminary where he'd "not had
enough liberty."

But time went by and not one of my companions could tell me
what sort of an odd person the man I was going to replace at
Bikomimbo was. "He's an extraordinary chap," they informed
me, and that's all I could get out of them.

"When you start life in this country," the feverish little
Pyrenean warned me, "you've got to make the devil of an impres-
sion. It's all entirely one way or the other. You'll either be
the apple of the manager's eye or absolute anathema to him. And
you're summed up right away, mark you." Personally, I was ter-
rified of being placed in a class with the anathemas, or even
worse.

My young slaver friends took me to call on another of our
colleagues in the company, who deserves special mention in this
story. He kept a shop counter in the middle of the European
quarter. Rotting with fatigue, oily, on the verge of collapse, he
dreaded the light because of his eyes, which two years of un-
interrupted scorching under a corrugated iron roof had dried up
appallingly. He spent half an hour of a morning opening them, so
he said, and even then it was another half-hour before he could see
at all clearly. Every bright ray of light hurt him. A vast mangy
mole.

To stifle and suffer had become almost second nature to him and
to steal had too. Any one who could have made him healthy and
scrupulous at one stroke would have done him a very bad turn.
His hatred for the general manager still seems to me to this
day, so long since, one of the fiercest passions that it has been
my lot to come across in a man. At the thought of the general
manager, an astonishing fury would transcend his aches, shaking
him and making him rave tremendously on the slightest provocation,
while he went on scratching himself uninterruptedly from top
to toe.

He never stopped scratching all round himself, in circles, so
to speak, from the base of his spine to the top of his neck. He
furrowed layer after layer of his skin with bloody finger nails,
never on that account forgetting to serve his customers, of whom
there were many, most of them more or less naked Negroes.

With his free hand he would dip busily into different receptacles
to right and left in the darkness of his shop and, without ever
making a mistake, with marvellous efficiency and quickness would
produce exactly what the purchaser needed in the way of strong-
smelling shreds of tobacco, damp matches, tins of sardines and
great ladlefuls of molasses, or over-proof beer in faked cannisters
which he would instantly drop again if seized by a frantic need
to scratch somewhere, let's say, in the vast profundities of his
trousers. When that happened, he'd plunge his whole arm down
them, and after a while it would appear again from the front,
which he had the precaution to keep always open.

He gave this malady which was consuming his skin its local
name of "Corocoro." "This infernal Corocoro! When I think that
swine of a manager hasn't caught it yet," he'd burst out, "it turns
my stomach sourer than ever. The Corocoro can't get a hold on
him. He's a damn sight too rotten already. That bastard--he's
not a man, he's a disease. He's an absolute lump of filth."
Every one at once burst out laughing, and the negro customers
copied them and laughed too. He frightened us a bit, this chap.
But he had a friend all the same, an asthmatic little creature with
greying hair, who drove one of the company's lorries. He always
used to bring us ice, which of course had been stolen from the
ships in port whenever he could lay hands on it.

We used to drink his health on the counter amid the tremend-
ously envious black clients. His clients were Negroes who were
sufficiently sharp not to be afraid of mingling with the whites,
only a certain set among them, in fact. The other Negroes were
less uninhibited and preferred instinctively to keep their distance.
But the boldest of them, the most contaminated, became assistants
at the shop. You could recognize which were the negro assistants
about the place by the way they cursed and swore at the other
blacks. Our Corocoro friend trafficked in crude rubber which was
brought from the bush and sold to him, in the form of moist balls,
by the sackfull.

As we stood there, never tired of listening to him, a family of
rubber tappers came timidly up and hovered about his doorstep.
The father was at their head, a wrinkled old man wearing a little
orange-coloured loin cloth and dangling his long cutlass in his
hand.

The poor savage didn't dare come in. So one of the native as-
sistants called out to him, "Come on, nigger! Come along in!
We no eat black man!" Thus addressed, they managed to make up
their minds. They trooped into the glittering store at the back
of which our Corocoro patient was raving.

The black, it seemed, had never seen a shop before, or any
whites either, maybe. One of his wives followed him, with lowered
eyes, carrying balanced on the top of her head a great pannier
full of raw rubber.

The assistants brusquely snatched at her pannier to weigh its
contents on the scales. Poppa native didn't understand the business
of the scales any more than the rest of it. His wife didn't dare raise
her head. The other members of the black family waited outside,
with very goggling eyes. They were made to come in, all the
children and everybody, so that they shouldn't miss anything of
the show.

It was the first time they'd come all together like that from
the bush towards the white men and their town. They must have
all been working away for a very long time to collect all that
rubber. So that the result of the deal was naturally of great
interest to the whole family. It takes a long time to sweat rubber
into the little containers you hang on the trunks of the trees.
It often takes over two months to get a small cupful.

When the weighing had been done, our scratching friend took
the gaping Negro behind the counter and worked out in chalk
what was due to him and stuffed a few pieces of silver into the
hollow of his hand. Then, "Get out," he said to him, just like
that. "There's your money!"

All his little white friends squealed with laughter, he'd put
the deal over so well. The Negro stood there unhappily before the
counter, with his little orange covering round his loins.

"Don't understand money, do you, bo? Don't know nuthin, eh?"
the most irrepressible clerk, who was anyway probably accus-
tomed to these peremptory transactions, shouted at him to
wake him up. "You don't parly French, do you? Still a gorilla
are you? What do you savvy then, tell me? Kouskous? Mabillia?
You're a clod, ain't you? A bush ape--a damn great clod."

But the Negro stood before us, holding the coins in his fist.
He'd have bolted if he'd dared. But he didn't dare.

"What you buy with your dough then, nigger?" put in the
scratcher at just the right moment. "I haven't seen quite such
a mug as this for a long time, I must say," he observed. "It must
have come from way back. What d'you want? Give me that stuff!"

He snatched the money away from him and in its place shoved
into the palm of his hand a large bright-green handkerchief
which he nimbly extracted from a drawer in the counter.

The Negro hesitated to leave with his handkerchief. Then the
scratcher went one better. He certainly knew all the tricks of a
roaring trade all right. Waving the great square of green cloth
before the eyes of one of the little black kids: "Don't you think
that's pretty, you little bug, you? Haven't seen a handkerchief
like that before, have you, my pretty one; have you, my dungheap,
my little black-belly?" And without more ado, he tied it round
the kid's neck, dressing him completely.

The backwoods family now gazed at their little one adorned
by this great green cotton thing.... There was nothing more
to be done about it now that the handkerchief had come into the
family. There was nothing left but to accept it, take it, and go
away.

So they all began to back gradually out and through the door.
Just as the father, who was last, turned to say something, the
toughest of the assistants, who wore shoes, helped him out with
a great kick on the behind.

The whole little tribe, in a group, stood silently on the other
side of the Avenue Faidherbe, under a magnolia tree, watching
us finish our drinks. You'd have said that they were trying to
understand what had happened to them.

It was our "Corocoro" friend's party. He even played his
gramophone for us. There wasn't anything you couldn't find
in his shop. It reminded me of the supply trains in the war.




AND SO, AS I SAY, THERE WERE A WHOLE LOT OF NEGROES
AND whites working away with me in the warehouses and on the
plantations of the Porduriere Company of Little Togo when I
was there,--little clerks like me. The natives after all have to
be bludgeoned into doing their job--they've still got that much
self-respect. Whereas the whites carry on on their own; they've
been well schooled by the State.

The wielder of the lash gets very tired of his job in the end,
but the white man's heart is brimful of the hope of power and
wealth and that doesn't cost anything: not a thing. Let's hear
no more about Egypt and the Tartar tyrants! In the supreme art
of urging the two-legged animal really to put his back into his
work, these classical exponents are the merest conceited amateurs.
It never entered the heads of the antique school to give the slave
a "Mister" before his name, to get him to vote now and again, to
buy him his newspaper; above all, to put him in the front line
so as to rid him of his baser passions! With two thousand years
of Christianity behind him (I should know something about
that), a man can't see a regiment of soldiers march past without
going off the deep end. It starts off far too many ideas in his
head.

So I decided, as far as I myself was concerned, to watch my step
very carefully in the future and moreover to learn to keep my
mouth well shut, not to let any one see that I was aching to clear
out; in fact, if possible and in spite of everything, to get on in the
service of the Porduriere Company. There wasn't a minute to lose.

Alongside our warehouses down by the slimy banks of the river
a cunning line of crocodiles permanently and watchfully lingered.
Metallic sort of brutes, they revelled in the delirious heat; and so,
it seemed, did the Negroes.

In the middle of the day one wondered whether this activity of
hustling crowds throughout the docks could all be true, this
parrot house of excited squawking blacks.

With a view to learning how to check over sacks before taking
to the bush myself, I had to get used to being gradually asphyxiated
along with the other clerks in the company's main warehouse,
standing between two great weighing scales stuck in the
middle of a mass of sweating Negroes covered with sores, in
rags and singing. Each of them trailed along a little cloud of dust
behind him which shook to his rhythm. The dull thuds of the
overseers' lashes fell on their magnificent backs without calling
forth the least protest or complaint. Theirs was a cretinish
passivity. They bore pain as simply as they put up with the
torrid atmosphere of this dusty furnace.

The manager came along from time to time, almost always in
a bad temper, to make sure that I really was getting on in the
business of checking numbers and faking weights.

He cleared his way through the press of natives with great
swipes of his cane. "Bardamu," he said to me one morning when
he was feeling good, "you see all these niggers here, don't you?
Well, when I first came out to Little Togo, nearly thirty years ago,
they lived by hunting, fishing and killing each other off, tribe
against tribe, the dirty scum! When I started as a mere clerk in
charge of a trading station, I used to see them, just like I'm tell-
ing you, coming back to their villages after a victory, carrying
upwards of a hundred baskets full of good, bleeding, human flesh,
which they were going to stuff into their bellies! D'you hear,
Bardamu? Bleeding human meat! All that was left of their ene-
mies! Talk about a binge! Nowadays, they don't do any scrapping.
We've come along--and there aren't any tribes now! No nonsense.
No funny business. Hard work and monkeynuts, that's what. A job
to be done. No more hunting! No more rifles--just monkeynuts
and rubber! So that they can pay their taxes. Taxes so that
they can bring us in more rubber and more monkeynuts. Life's
like that, Bardamu! Monkeynuts! Monkeynuts and rubber! ...
Oh, look, here's General Tombat coming our way."

He it was indeed, coming towards us, an old man on the
verge of collapse beneath the enormous weight of the sun.

The general was no longer really a soldier, and yet he wasn't
simply a civilian either. He was adviser to the Porduriere
Company and served as a link between the colonial authorities
and Business Interests--an all-important link, since these two
bodies were always in league and at war with each other. But
General Tombat was a marvelous "fixer." He, and a few others,
not long ago, had somehow wriggled out of a shady transaction
in enemy shares which high circles had considered it beyond their
power to unravel.

Soon after the war started, General Tombat's ear had been
slightly split: just enough to put him honourably onto the retired
list, after Charleroi. He'd immediately placed his services at the
disposal of Greater France across the water. Yet Verdun, which was
long since over, still worried him. He was always waving telegrams
about. "They'll hold it, bless 'em--our brave lads are holding
fast!" It was so infernally hot in the warehouse and it was all so
far away, France and everything, that no one cared a hoot for
General Tombat's prognostications. Still we all, including the
general manager, said politely, in chorus, "They're wonderful!"
and at these words Tombat left us.

Shortly after that the manager opened his vicious way again
through tight-packed bodies and in his turn disappeared into
the peppery dust.

His eyes were glowing like coals; the man was possessed by the
excitement of having the whole company in his grasp; he frightened
me rather, I found it difficult to get accustomed to his presence,
even. I wouldn't have believed that there was one single human
carcass in the world capable of such a maximum intensity of
greed. He hardly ever spoke to us in a natural voice, only in
muffled phrases; you'd have said that he only lived, only thought,
in order passionately to plot and spy and betray. It was declared
that on his own account he stole, swindled and embezzled a lot
more than all the company's other servants put together--and
they weren't wasting their time, I can tell you. But I've no
difficulty in believing it.

While I remained in Fort-Gono, I still had a little time to
walk about this so-called town, where only one spot struck me
as desirable--the hospital.

As soon as you arrive in some place, you discover ambitions in
yourself. Personally what I wanted to do was to be ill, just ill,
nothing more than that. Allow a man his likes. I wandered around
these hospitable and attractive buildings, distant, sad and set
apart, nor ever left them and their antiseptic charms without
regret. Lawns encircled this domain, which were adorned by little
furtive birds and scurrying, multicoloured lizards. A sort of
earthly Paradise.

As for the black men, one soon gets used to them, to their
gay somnolence, to their too slow gestures and the protuberant
stomachs of their women.

The black race stinks in its poverty, its endless little vanities,
the obscenity of its resignation: just like our own poor, in fact,
except that they have more brats about the place and less dirty
washing hanging up, and less red wine.

When I'd finished sniffing at the hospital, inhaling it in this
way, I went off, following the native crowd, to stand for a while
outside the sort of pagoda which a trader had built near the
fort for the amusement of the brighter rakes in the colony.

The well-to-do whites in Fort-Gono used to show up there of
a night, and gamble wildly and drink hard, and yawn and sweat.
For two hundred francs you could have the good lady who ran
it. The merrymakers' trousers were the devil of a nuisance to them
when they wanted to have a good scratch; their braces were always
slipping.

At night a whole crowd of people came out of their huts in
the native quarter and stood about in front of the pagoda, never
tired of seeing the white men jogging around the mechanical
piano, with its moist chords and those tuneless waltzes they'd
put up with. The manageress looked cheerful and happy as if
she'd rather like to dance, as she listened to the music.

After several attempts on various days I at last got into con-
versation with her, surreptitiously, once or twice. Her clients
exhausted her, she told me. Not that they made love frequently,
but because drinks at the Pagoda were rather on the expensive
side, they used to try, while they were at it, to get a bit extra
for their money and would pinch her bottom a lot before they
left. That's really what made her so tired.

This good business lady knew all the gossip of the colony and
all about the love affairs which were entered into in desperation
by officers harassed with fever and the handful of commissioners'
wives who, melting away in endless monthly courses, lay prostrate
on verandas dotted with permanently lowered deck chairs.

The streets, the offices and shops of Fort-Gono overflowed with
vain desires. To do everything that is done in Europe, despite the
hideous heat and a growing, inescapable imbecility, seemed to be
the chief and fiercest obsession, the joy and aim of all these
sentence servers.

The bloated vegetation in the gardens could barely be kept at
bay within their palisades. Untamed, fierce sprouts flared up
like nightmare lettuces round each house containing, like the
solid great wrinkled white of an egg, the yolk of a slowly
rotting, jaundiced European. So that Fachoda Avenue, the live-
liest and most crowded in Fort-Gono, became a row of as many
brimming salad bowls as there were colonial administrators.

I went back every evening to my hut, which obviously no one
would ever finish building, and there my skeleton of a bed
awaited me, made up by my pervert of a boy. He vamped me, he
was as lascivious as a cat; he wanted to. become part of my
family. But I was haunted by other, much more important things
to think about, and particularly by the idea of escaping to the
hospital for a little while, the only respite within my reach
in this blistering jamboree.

In peace time as in war, I wasn't at all inclined to futile pleas-
ures. And other offers besides, which came to me through the
boss's cook, and were very genuinely and exceptionally obscene,
roused none of my enthusiasm.

I went one last round of my Porduriere Company colleagues, try-
ing to discover something about this faithless servant whom I
was being ordered to find and replace, at all costs, in his forest
home. Chatter was all I got. Nor could I get anything more definite
out of the Cafe Faidherbe, at the end of Fachoda Avenue, which
in the evening hours buzzed with hatred, malice and all unchar-
itableness. Only vague suppositions. All the dustbins of rumour
were emptied in this half-light cast by many-coloured lamps.
The wind, shaking the lace-like foliage of giant palms, shed
clouds of mosquitoes into one's cups. The governor, because of
his high position, got his fair share of the ambiguously express-
ed remarks that were passed. His extraordinary asininity formed
the basis of the conversation over cocktails, which relieves a
queasy colonial liver before dinner.

All the cars in Fort-Gono, about ten in all, passed at this hour
to and fro in front of the cafe. They never seemed to go far, these
cars. Faidherbe Square had a clearly defined personality of its
own, with the forthright architectural beauties, the vegetable and
verbal excess of a Midi main square gone mad. And the ten autos
never left Faidherbe Square without returning to it five minutes
later, having once again completed their round, bearing a cargo
of prostrate, anamic Europeans in light-coloured clothes, like so
many melting ice creams.

These colonizers passed each other in the street week after
week and year after year until they were so tired of hating each
other that they no longer looked at anybody. Some of the officers
took their families for walks, all of them on the look-out for
salutes from the military and bows from the civilians: the wives
swaddled in special sanitary wrappings, the children like some
awful sort of pale-face maggot from a northern latitude, dissolving
in the heat, suffering permanently from diarrhea.

To give orders, you need more than a kepi; you need soldiers.
In this hot climate white troops melted away faster than butter.
A battalion at Fort-Gono behaved like sugar in a coffee cup--
the longer you looked the less you saw of it. The greater part
of the white contingent were always in hospital, sleeping off their
malaria, crawling with a different sort of parasite to each hair
and every cranny of their bodies; whole squads lying back amid
cigarettes and flies, contriving an infinite number of deliberately
induced, fake, shivering fits.

They lay there shirking, poor devils, a shameful group in the
pleasant half light cast by the green shutters; they'd not been
long in the ranks before they dropped out and rejoined little
shop assistants--the hospital was both civil and military--in
common flight from their bosses and the bush, tracked down
by both.

So utterly apathetic and hot are these moist, unhealthy siesta
hours that even the flies fall asleep. Bloodless, hairy arms hang
down each side of the bed, dangling dingy novelettes; always
tattered too they were, these books, lacking half their pages,
because the dysentery patients never have paper enough, and also
because the more disagreeable nuns have their own method of
censoring all volumes that they consider "not quite nice."

Depressing as the hospital was, it was nevertheless the only
place where you could feel yourself forgotten for a while, safe
from the outer world, safe from your superiors. A respite from
slavery, an essential relief, the only form of happiness I could
hope for.

I made enquiries about the conditions of entry, about the doc-
tors' habits and special fads. I no longer regarded my departure
for the bush with anything but despair and disgust, and I was
already promising myself that as soon as ever I could I would
catch every infection within reach and return to Fort-Gono sick,
and so emaciated, so revolting, that they'd simply have to make
up their minds not only to take me in but to send me home.
The tricks for getting ill I knew well enough, some of them
first-class ones, and I picked up some special new ones for the
colonies.

I prepared myself to overcome innumerable difficulties, since
neither the heads of the Porduriere Company nor the leaders of
the military were at all easy to sidetrack from their scraggy
prey, tossing and twitching between stinking sheets.

They would find me ready to rot with any illness they cared
to name. Besides, as a general rule, one didn't stay long at that
hospital--unless one terminated one's colonial career there for
good and all. The most subtle, the smartest fever patients, the
ones with most force of character behind them, sometimes managed
to slip on to some transport and get taken home. It was a sweet
miracle if you did. Most of the hospital inmates confessed them-
selves at their wits' ends, no match for the rules and regulations:
they went back into the jungle and faded away. If quinine entirely
failed to hold them together while they were still in the hospital's
care, the almoner merely closed their eyes at six o'clock in
the evening and four Senegalese orderlies stumped off with the
bloodless rubbish to a plot of red clay near the church at Fort-
Gono, which was so hot under its corrugated iron roof, twice as
tropical as the tropics, that no one ever went there more than once.
If you tried to stand up in that church, you panted like a dog.

That's the way it goes with men--it's certainly very hard to
accomplish all that's required of one in life, first as a butter-
fly when young, and then as a maggot when the end comes.

Again I tried to glean some information here and there, a few
details, to give me some idea. What the general manager had told
me about Bikomimbo struck me as indeed incredible. It appeared
it was a tentatively established trading station, an attempt at
penetration far into the interior, ten days away at least, an iso-
lated spot in the midst of the aborigines and their jungle--which
latter was described to me as a vast domain crammed with wild
beasts and infectious diseases.

I wondered if they weren't quite simply envious of my luck,
these little fellow employees of mine, whose mood was always
alternately either acute melancholia or aggressiveness.

Their stupidity (that's all they had) depended on the quality
of the alcohol they had been imbibing, and the letters they had
received from home, and on the greater or smaller amount of
hope they had lost during the day. As a rule the more depressed
they were, the more bombastic they became. They were ghosts
(like Ortolan at the front) and would have been capable of any
sort of bravado.

Cocktails before supper lasted three full hours. The governor
was the main pivot of all conversations, he was always talked
about; the rest of the time it was anything and everything that
could or couldn't be stolen; and finally sex: these three topics
made up the colours of the colonial flag. The civil servants who
were present frankly accused the military of contravening and
abusing authority; and the military had a great deal to say in
return. For their part, the traders considered the whole bunch a
lot of hypocritical, dishonest bullies.

As for the governor, the rumour that he was being recalled had
gone the round every morning for ten long years and still the
looked-for telegram which was to depose him never arrived--
in spite of the at least two anonymous letters which, week after
week from time immemorial, were sped to the Minister for the
Colonies back at home, bearing a careful catalogue of this local
tyrant's horrible misdeeds.

The blacks are lucky with their desiccated skins: the white man,
poor wretch, encased in his artex shirt, gets poisoned by the acid
sweat of his own body. So beware of going too near him. I'd
learnt my lesson on the Admiral Bragueton.

In a very few days I'd found out a wonderful lot about my own
manager--about his past, as full of shady deals as any prison
of a port of war. All sorts of things were to be unearthed in
his past, including, I imagine, several marvellous miscarriages of
justice. It's true that his appearance was against him with that
appalling, obvious criminal's face of his; or rather, not to be
too harsh on any one, that look of the headstrong man hell bent on
asserting himself--which comes to the same thing.

During the siesta, if you passed that way, you caught a glimpse
of an occasional white woman lying around in her shaded bungalow
on the Boulevard Faidherbe, the wife of some officer or resident.
Poor dears, the climate troubled them much more than the men
themselves! With their whispering little voices charmingly breath-
less, and their tremendously indulgent smiles, they looked like
women dying happily, their pallor plastered over with paint.
These middle-class ladies showed less courage and bore themselves
less well than the good woman at the Pagoda, who had no one
but herself to depend on. Meanwhile the Porduriere Company was
getting through a large number of its little white servants
like me; every season it lost ten or a dozen of these sub-men
in jungle trading stations near the mangrove swamps. Pioneers,
they're called.

Every morning the Army and Commerce came and whined for their
missing units at the office of the hospital. Not a day passed
without some captain or other thundering threats at the Chief
Medical Officer, and damning his eyes for not sending back
right away the three sergeants quaking with malaria and the
two syphilitic corporals who were exactly what he needed to
form a company. If he was told that his clodhoppers had died,
he stopped bothering the damned doctors, and himself went back
to have another little drink at the Pagoda.

You hardly had time to notice men, things and days as they
disappeared in all this lushness, this climate, the heat and
the swarms of mosquitoes. Everything went the same way--it
was revolting; in bits, in words, in dwindling flesh, in regret, in
beads of sweat, melting away in a torrent of blazing light and
colour; time and taste went with the rest; it all passed out the
same way. There was nothing in the air but a glittering death
agony.

At last the little cargo boat, which was to carry me down the
coast one stage nearer my destination, anchored in sight of Fort-
Gono. The Papaoutab she was called. She was a good flatbottomed
boat, built for navigating estuaries, and she burned wood for
fuel. I, as the only white on board, was allotted a nook be-
tween the ship's kitchen and the lavatory. We progressed so
slowly that at first I thought we must be manoeuvring our way out
of the roadstead. But we never went any faster. The Papaoutab
was incredibly weak. We travelled along like this in sight of the
coast, an infinite grey strip tufted with little trees in a dancing
mist of heat. What a journey! The Papaoutab nosed her way through
the water as if she had sweated it all herself, very painfully.
She split one wavelet after another, as if they'd been stitches
in the dressing of a wound. It seemed to me from a distance
that the pilot was probably a mulatto; I say "seemed" because
I never found sufficient energy to go all that way up onto
the bridge to find out. I stayed down below in the passageway
with my negro fellow travellers until about five o'clock. If you
don't want the sun to burn the eyes out of your head, you have
to blink like a rat. After five you can treat yourself to a look
around the horizon--what a life of luxury! That grey fringe of
land, tufted down by the water's edge like some lank underarm,
meant nothing much to me. The air was horrible to breathe, even
at night, it was still so warm and sticky and salt. What with the
smell of the engines as well, and by day waves that on one side
were too yellow and on the other too blue, the staleness of it all
depressed one to the heart. One was actually worse off than on the
Admiral Bragueton, except, of course, for the absence of murderous
soldiery.

At last we approached my destination. I was reminded of the
place's name: Topo. After coughing, spitting and quivering on
these oily dish-waters for as long a time as it took to consume
three times four meals of tinned food, the Papaoutah finally
hove to.

Three large, thatched huts stood out on the sharp, tufted edge
of the land. From a distance and at first sight it was rather a
pleasant-looking spot. There was the mouth of the great sandy
river up which, they explained to me, I was to go in a canoe to
reach my home in the heart of the forest. It had been arranged
that I was to stay only a few days at this coastal trading station
at Topo--just long enough to get myself finally broken in to the
idea of life in the colonies.

We headed for a flimsy landing stage, but the fat-bellied
Papaoutah, before reaching it, fouled the bar. I remember that
bamboo landing stage well. It was an interesting object. It had
to be rebuilt, I gathered, every month, because thousands of agile,
ready molluscs gnawed it away as soon as it was mended. Its
continual reconstruction was one of the maddening jobs which
made life unbearable for Lieutenant Grappa, commandant at Topo
station and the surrounding district. The Papaoutah only called
once a month, but a month was all those molluscs needed to polish
off the landing stage.

On my arrival Lieutenant Grappa seized my papers, verified their
correctness, copied their particulars into a virgin register, and
offered me a drink. I was the first traveller, he confided to
me, who had come to Topo in more than two years. People didn't
come to Topo. There wasn't any reason why they should. Serving
under Lieutenant Grappa was Sergeant Alcide. In their isolation,
no love was lost between these two men. "I have to keep my second
in command in his place," Lieutenant Grappa told me on our first
meeting. "He is inclined to be rather too familiar."

As in this desolate place it would have been impossible to
invent happenings that were not too utterly improbable (the
setting didn't lend itself) Sergeant Alcide made out a lot of
"O.K." reports which Grappa signed at once, and which in due
course the Papaoutah delivered to the governor-general.

Among the neighbouring lagoons and in the depths of the
forest emaciated tribes stagnated, bemused by sleeping sickness
and chronic poverty: even so, these wretched creatures produced
their small tax, levied, of course, under the lash. What's more,
a few of their younger men were recruited as militiamen and
delegated to handle the lash themselves. A dozen men comprised
this force.

I know what I am talking about; I knew them well. Lieutenant
Grappa equipped these lucky ones as best he might and fed them
on a regular diet provision of rice.

They were given one rifle between twelve and a little French
flag apiece. No boots. But as everything in this world is rela-
tive and comparative, the original recruits at Topo thought that
Grappa did things in fine style. Every day he had to turn away
enthusiastic volunteers who were fed up with life in the jungle.

Game was scarce near the village, so, failing gazelle, at least
one grandmother was eaten per week. Every morning at seven Al-
cide's troops paraded for drill. As I was living in a corner of
his hut which he had given up to me, I had a front-row seat for
this fantasia. Never has any army in the world had soldiers who
showed greater keenness. On Alcide's word of command, these
primitives spent themselves, as they tramped across the sand in
fours and eights and all twelve at a time, in imagining that
they had packs, boots and even bayonets of their own and, more
marvellous still, in actually pretending to use them. Newly
emerged from a vigourous, near-by Nature, an apology for khaki
shorts was all they wore. Everything else had to be imagined--
and was. At Alcide's peremptory "Attack!" these ingenious
warriors of his put down their make-belief packs and dashed
wildly forward, to lunge imaginary bayonets at imaginary en-
emies. Then, making as if to unbutton their tunics, they would
stack their rifles and at another sign from Alcide become pass-
ionately absorbed in abstractions of musketry. To see them in
open formation, thus assiduously gesticulating, or capering in
a pattern of intricate and prodigiously futile movements, was
depressing to the point of nausea. Especially as at Topo the
breathless heat was acutely magnified on this strip of sand be-
tween the glittering reflections of the sea and the river. You
could have sworn by your backside that you were being forced
to sit on a burning chunk broken off the sun.

But these pitiless conditions did not stop Alcide from shouting.
Far from it. His yells sailed out over his ridiculous squad at
drill to the venerable cedars on the distant outskirts of the
jungle. And even further echoed the thunders of his "Companeee?
'Shun!"

Meanwhile Lieutenant Grappa was engaged in maintaining the law.
(We shall come back to that later.) And he always watched from
afar, from the shade of his cabin, the fugitive reconstruction
of his wretched landing stage. Each time the Papaoutab called at
Topo, he would go down optimistically and sceptically to await
the arrival of full equipments for his recruits. For the last two
years he had been vainly clamouring for this equipment. Being a
Corsican, Grappa felt perhaps more acutely humiliated than most
at the thought of his militiamen remaining unclothed.

In our hut, I mean Alcide's, a more or less illicit trade went on
in a few trifling bits and pieces. As a matter of fact, all bus-
iness in Topo was in Alcide's hands, since he had a small stock,
the only existing stock, of tobacco in leaf and in packets, a few
litres of alcohol and some yards of cotton goods.

Yet it was obvious Topo's twelve militiamen entertained a real
affection for Alcide, in spite of the fact that he bellowed at
them all day long, and kicked their backsides rather unjustly.
Nevertheless these military nudists discerned in him unmistakable
traces of kinship with themselves--the great kinship of innate
and incurable poverty. Tobacco had brought them together, as
such things will, black though they were. I had a few European
papers with me. Alcide looked through them, trying to bring his
mind to bear on those absurd columns of print; he could not get
through them. "I don't really care a damn now about what's hap-
pening," he confessed to me after these vain attempts. "I've
been out here three solid years!" That didn't mean that Alcide
wished to impress me by playing the hermit, but the brutal in-
difference with which the world in general had always treated him
was forcing him in his turn to look upon the great world beyond
Topo, in his simple sergeant's way, as some sort of remote planet.

But Alcide was a good sort really, willing and generous and
so on. I was to understand this later--a little too late. He was
being overwhelmed by his wonderful resignation to fate, the
basic quality which makes poor blighters in the army as easy to
kill off as to let live. They rarely, if ever, ask the why and the
wherefore of what happens to them, of all they have to put up
with. They merely hate the sight of each other and that's enough.

Round about our hut bright, curious little fugitive flowers
pushed their way here and there through a waste of burning,
merciless sand; green, pink or purple, such as one never sees in
Europe except in reproduction and on certain porcelains, a prim-
itive sort of convolvuli. They lived through the whole abominable
day closed on their stems and in the evening opened to tremble
prettily on the first luke-warm breeze.

One day when Alcide saw me picking some of these flowers, he
warned me: "Pick them if you like, but don't water them, the
little beauties. ... It only kills them. They're terribly frag-
ile, not like those sunflowers at Rambouillet which we used to
make grow when we were kids. You could piss on them--they'd drink
anything! Flowers, of course, are just like men--the bigger they
are, the bloodier fools they are." This of course was meant for a
hit at Lieutenant Grappa, that vast calamity of a man, with his
square, appalling, purple hands. Hands which would never understand
anything. But then Grappa never even tried to understand.

I stayed two weeks at Topo, during which time I not only lived
and messed with Alcide and shared his fleas (both sorts: sand
fleas and the other kind), but also his quinine and his water,
from a well near by, which was invariably tepid and gave you
diarrhea.

One day when Lieutenant Grappa was feeling particularly amiable
he asked me, for a change, to come and take coffee with him.
Grappa was a jealous creature and never let any one see his
native woman. So to invite me he'd picked on a day when his
Negress had gone to her village to visit her family. It also
happened to be the day of his functions in court. He wished to
make me feel impressed.

Around his hut, having been there since the morning, stood a
curious group of plaintiffs and chattering witnesses, in vari-
ously coloured loin cloths. Defendants and lookers-on mixed in-
discriminately, all smelling foully of garlic, sandalwood, rancid
butter, saffron and sweat. Like Alcide's soldiers, everyone of
these beings seemed intent above all on an agitated frenzy of
makebelief. They were enveloped in a clacking haze of words like
castanets and their clenched fists were being brandished above
their heads in a torrent of argument.

Lieutenant Grappa, deep in his cane chair, which creaked plaint-
ively under his weight, smiled in the face of all this incoherency
gathered together. He trusted for guidance on these occasions to
his native interpreter, who passed back to him in his own mean-
ingless way, and at the top of his voice, a series of incredible
requests.

The case might well concern a one-eyed sheep which the parents
of a girl who had been quite legally sold in marriage but never
delivered to her husband were now refusing to return, on account
of a murder which her brother had seen fit to commit in the in-
terval on the person of the sister of the man who was at present
keeping the sheep. And many other and more complicated
grievances....

Looking up at us, in their excitement over all these problems of
conflicting interest and custom, a hundred faces bared their teeth,
uttering little clicking, or great gurgling, negro words.

The heat had reached its zenith. One peered through an angle of
the roof at the sky, to see if something ghastly wasn't about to
happen. Not even a storm.

"I'll settle all their differences once and for all, damn me if I
don't!" decided Grappa at last, driven to making up his mind by
the heat and all this palaver. "Where's the bride's father? Bring
him in!"

"There he is!" twenty of them answered, pushing forward a
feeble old Negro draped with great dignity in a yellow cloth like
a Roman toga. The old duffer bore witness with his closed fist
to everything that was being said around him. He didn't look
at all as if he had come to lodge any complaint himself, but just
to while away the time listening to a lawsuit from which he had
long since given up any hope of obtaining any positive result.

"All right," said Grappa. "Twenty cuts! Let's get on with it.
Twenty cuts of the lash for the old sod. That'll teach him to
come and bloody well waste my time every Thursday in the last
two months with all this drivel about bogus sheep...."

The old man saw four hefty policemen bearing down on him. He
didn't understand what was up at first, and then he began to
roll eyes gone bloodshot with terror, like the eyes of some
aged beast that has never before been beaten. He didn't really
try to resist, but he didn't know either what position to take
up so as to be hurt as little as possible by this infliction of
justice.

His captors were dragging at his clothes. Two of them insisted
on his kneeling, whereas the others told him to lie on his face.
In the end they just had him down anyhow, removing his garment;
then right away one of those flexible batons was laid across his
backside and shoulders hard enough to make a hefty burro bray
for days. As he writhed, the fine sand spurted up round his stomach,
mixed with blood; he spat sand as he screamed. It was as if some
enormous pregnant basset bitch were being wilfully tortured.

Every one round was silent while it was going on. The sounds
of punishment were all one heard. Once the thing was over, the
old man after his trouncing tried to get up and pull his toga
about him. His mouth, his nose, and the whole of his back espe-
cially, were pouring with blood. The crowd led him away, fuss-
ing and buzzing and commenting on it all as gloomily as if it
had been a funeral.

Lieutenant Grappa relit his cigar. With me there, he wished to
appear detached. Not, I imagine, that he was more of a Nero
than most, but simply because he didn't enjoy being forced to
think. It annoyed him a great deal. What made him particularly
irritable when he sat in court was that people would keep asking
him questions.

We witnessed that day two other memorable inflictions of pun-
ishment, following on further perplexing acccounts of dowries
returned, poisons promised, promises unfulfilled and uncertain
offspring.

"Oh, if they only knew how little I care about their bloody
lawsuits, they'd never leave their forest to come and bother me
here with all this drivelling nonsense.... Dammit, I don't run
to them with my little troubles, do I?" He paused. "Eventually
I shall come to believe the damned fools like my justice," he went
on. "I've been trying for two whole years to cure them of their
taste for it, but they come back every Thursday just the same.
Believe me or not, young man, it's almost always the same ones
that come! It's a vice with them, damn me if it isn't."

After that, conversation turned towards Toulouse, where Grappa
always spent his leaves and where he meant to go when he retired
in six years' time. That was what he had in mind. We had come,
very pleasantly, to the Calvados stage when we were again inter-
rupted by a Negro with God knows what sorrow on his mind, who
had been late in coming to be eased of it. He'd arrived on his
own, two hours after everybody else, to have himself thrashed.
He'd been two days and two nights on his way in from his vill-
age and had no intention of returning home, so to speak, empty-
handed. But he was late and Grappa never made allowances in
the matter of penal punctuality.

"That's his own damn fault! He shouldn't have gone away the
last time he was here. I sentenced him to those fifty strokes
last Thursday, not this, the silly bugger!"

But the fellow protested. He said he had a perfectly good excuse.
He'd had to hurry back to his village to bury his mother. Four or
five mothers he had apparently, all of his own. There was a lot
of arguing....

"It'll have to wait till next session."

But there was hardly time for this masochist to get to his
village and back before next Thursday. He protested. He became
obstinate. We had to kick him very hard up the backside
to get him out of the camp. That pleased him a good deal, but
not enough. He ended up by going round to Alcide, who seized the
opportunity, quickly selling our masochistic friend a whole as-
sortment of tobaccos, in shag, in packets and in the form of
snuff.

Having been much entertained by all this, I took my leave of
Lieutenant Grappa; it was time for his siesta and he went indoors.
At the back of the hut his native woman was already waiting
for him, having just come back from her village. She had a grand
pair of teats, this Negress, and had been very nicely brought up
by the nuns in French Guinea. Not only did this admirable baby
speak French with a pretty lisp, but she knew how to give you
your quinine properly mixed with jam, and how to hunt for
jiggers deep in the soles of your feet. She could make herself
pleasant to her white master in a hundred different ways without
tiring him, or by tiring him, whichever he preferred.

Alcide was waiting for me. He was feeling a little aggrieved.
No doubt it was this invitation I'd had the honour to receive
from Lieutenant Grappa that prompted him to confide in me.
And they were a lot of very ugly things he told me. Without my
asking for it, he favoured me with a specially disgusting and frank
word picture of Grappa. I answered that I entirely agreed with
him in everything he said. Alcide's particular weakness was that
in spite of military regulations, which utterly prohibited it, he
did business with the natives in the neighbouring villages and
also with the twelve men under his command. All these people
he mercilessly supplied with tobacco. When his soldiers had been
given their bit of tobacco, there wasn't any of their pay left;
they'd smoked it all away. They even smoked it in advance.
Grappa made out that considering the scantiness of the popu-
lation in the district, this niggling practice adversely affected
the tax returns.

Lieutenant Grappa was prudent enough not to wish to provoke
a scandal in Topo while it was under his jurisdiction, but perhaps
he was jealous; at all events, he was touchy and disagreeable
about it. He would naturally enough have preferred the whole of
the natives' financial resources to have remained at the disposal
of the tax collector. Every one has his own way of looking at
things and his own little ambitions.

At first this system of credit on their pay had seemed rather
amazing, and even a bit hard, to these soldiers who were serving
merely for the privilege of smoking Alcide's tobacco; but they'd
had their bottoms kicked until they'd got used to it. They now
didn't even attempt to go and collect their pay; they sat quietly
smoking it away ahead of time, amid the little bright-coloured
flowers near Alcide's cabin, between two spells of imaginative
drill.

The point is that even at Topo, small as the place was, there
was room for two methods of civilization: Grappa's rather
Roman system, which consisted in merely bambooing your subjects
to extract tribute from them (and to keep a shameful tithe of
it oneself, according to Alcide), and the Alcide system proper,
which was more complex and showed certain signs of a secondary
social stage, since in it every native soldier has become a client:
a military-commercial combination, in fact, which is much more
up-to-date and hypocritical,--the system we use to-day.

As for geography, Lieutenant Grappa had to depend on a few very
rough maps which he kept at the post to calculate the extent of
the vast regions confided to his care. As a matter of fact, he
wasn't particularly anxious to know much about them, anyway.
Trees and jungle, after all, are obvious enough; you can see
them perfectly well from several miles away.

Hidden away in all this flowering forest of twisted vegetables,
a few decimated tribes of natives squatted amid fleas and flies,
crushed by tabus and eating nothing all the time except rotten
tapioca.

In absolute primitive innocence and simple cannibalism, they
lived in grovelling poverty and were ravaged by every pestilence.
There was no earthly point in having anything to do with them.
There was nothing to justify sending some painful expedition to
take them in hand, which would only leave no trace. So Grappa,
when he had finished meting out justice, preferred to turn
towards the sea and gaze at that horizon across which he had
one day come to Topo, and beyond which he would one day go,
if all went well....

Familiar and finally pleasant as these parts had become for me,
I had to be thinking of moving on towards the forest shop which
was to be mine when I'd spent several days travelling up the
river and fighting my way through the bush.

Alcide and I had come to understand each other very well.
Together we used to try and catch swordfish, those sort of sharks
which swarmed in the sea in front of his cabin. He was as bad
at this game as I was. We never caught anything.

His cabin had nothing in it except his camp bed and mine and
a few packing cases, some empty, some full. It struck me that he
ought to be putting by quite a tidy bit, thanks to that little
business of his.

"Where do you put it?" I asked him a number of times.
"Where d' you hide your dirty little pile?" I thought I'd get a
rise Out of him. "You're going to make a hell of a splash when
you get back, aren't you?" I'd say, trying to pull his leg. And
at least twenty times while we put down that invariable meal of
tinned tomato, I made up a hundred and one astonishing adven-
tures which he would have on his triumphal return to Bordeaux.
He never said a word. He only grinned as if it amused him to
hear me talk this way.

Except for drill and the sessions of justice, really nothing at
all ever happened at Topo--so of course I went back again and
again to my same joke, because there wasn't anything else to
talk about.

I had lately thought of writing to M. Puta to touch him for
some more money. Alcide would see that my letter was posted
by the Papaoutab the next time she called. All Alcide's writing
materials were kept in a small biscuit tin exactly like the one
Branledore used to use. Evidently all sergeants had them. But
when Alcide saw me start to open the thing, I was surprised by
his making a move to stop me. I was annoyed. I couldn't think
why he should want to prevent my opening it, so I put it back on
the table. "Oh, all right, open it," he said at last; "it doesn't
matter." There, stuck on the inside of the lid, was a photograph
of a little girl. Only the head, a sweet little face, though--with
the long curls that were worn in those days. I took some paper
and the pen and quickly shut the tin. I felt very uncomfortable
because I'd been indiscreet, but all the same I wondered why he
had been so put out about it.

I at once imagined that it must be a child of his that he had
not told me about. I didn't ask him any more about it, but
behind me I could hear him endeavouring to tell me something
about the photograph, in an extraordinary tone of voice which
I had never heard him use before. I didn't know how on earth
to tide this over. It was going to be a very painful confidence
to listen to, I felt sure. And honestly, I wasn't at all keen.

"Don't mind about that," I heard him say at last. "It's my
brother's child.... They're both dead...."

"Her parents?"

"Yes, both of them."

"Who's looking after her now then?" I asked him, just to show
some interest in the story. "Your mother?"

"My mother's dead too."

"Who, then?"

"Why, me...."

Alcide sniggered, scarlet in the face, as if he'd just done some-
thing very wrong. He added hastily:

"Listen, I'll explain. ... I'm having her educated by the nuns
at Bordeaux. But not by nuns for poor folk, you get me. ... By
real better-class Sisters. ... I see to that all right, don't
you bother. I want her to have the best of everything. Ginette's
her name. She's a sweet little kid. Very like her mother, as a
matter of fact. I get letters from her now, she's getting on. But
of course that kind of school isn't cheap.... Especially now
that she's ten years old. I'd like her to have piano lessons too.
What do you think about piano lessons? The piano's a good thing
for a girl to learn, isn't it? And what about English? English
is very useful too, isn't it? You speak it, don't you?"

I began to take a very good look at Alcide, with his little
waxed moustache, his comic eyebrows, his parched skin, while
he blamed himself for not being generous enough towards his
little niece. Decent little Alcide! How he must have scraped on
his wretched salary, his footling little profits, his absurd little
bartering business--all these months, all these years, in this
infernal Topo! I didn't know what to say to him, I wasn't up to
it; but he was so much better a man than I that I went very
red in the face. Compared to Alcide, I was a useless ass, loutish
and vain. There were no two ways about it. There it was.

I did not dare say anything; I suddenly felt terribly unworthy
to speak to him. And only yesterday I hadn't taken much account
of Alcide, I had even despised him a little.

"I've not had much luck," he went on, not realizing that he
was embarrassing me with his confidences. "You see, two years
ago she had infantile paralysis. Think of it! You know all about
infantile paralysis, don't you?" He then explained to me that the
child's left leg was atrophied and that she was undergoing electrical
treatment from a specialist in Bordeaux.

"Does it come back, do you think?" he asked anxiously.

I assured him that one could get over it entirely, that time
and electricity worked wonders.

He spoke of her mother who was dead, and of the child's infirm-
ity, with a good deal of reticence. He was afraid, even at a
distance, of hurting her.

"Have you been to see her since her illness?"

"No. I was out here."

"Will you be going soon?"

"I don't think I will be able to for another three years....
You see, the thing is this. ... I am by way of doing a bit of
business out here. And that's a help to her. If I went on leave
now, my place would be taken, especially with that blighter
Grappa about...."

So Alcide was asking to stay on longer, to do six consecutive
years at Topo instead of three, for the sake of his little niece
from whom he only had a few letters and this portrait.

"What worries me most," he continued, when we were going
to bed, "is that she has nobody for the holidays. It's hard on
a little kid...."

Clearly Alcide could rise to sublime heights without difficulty,
could feel at home there; here was a fellow who hobnobbed with
the angels and you would never have guessed it.... Almost
without noticing he had given these years of hardship, the
annihilation of his wretched life in this tropical monotony, to a
little girl who was vaguely related to him, without conditions,
without bargaining, with no interest except that of his own
good heart. He was offering this little girl far away tenderness
enough to make a world anew, and no one would have known it.
Suddenly he slept, with the candle burning. In the end I got
up to study his features by its light. He slept like anybody
might. He looked quite ordinary. It wouldn't be a bad idea if
there were something to distinguish good men from bad.




THERE ARE TWO WAYS YOU CAN GO ABOUT PENETRATING A
FOREST. One is by tunnelling your way through it, like rats through
a hay-rick. It is the suffocating method. I struck at that. Or you can
face going up the river bundled up in the bottom of a hollow tree
trunk, paddled along from bend to wooded clump, glimpsing an
end of endless days, surrendering yourself entirely to the glare,
without respite. And so, dazed by these squawking blacks, you
get to whatever place you are going to in whatever state you can.

Your boatmen always need time, at the start, to get evenly
under way. Inevitably there's a dispute. Then first comes the
splash of a paddle, followed by two or three rhythmic yells,
which the forest's echo answers, and you're off, gliding forward,
two paddles, then three. You wonder what it's all about; waves,
chantings, and if you look back over your shoulder, the expanse
of sea down there slips further from you, and in front is the long,
flat stretch up which you are working; and there on the landing
stage, already almost lost in the river mist, a little Alcide, his
enormous bell-shaped topee hiding him almost entirely, a little
cheese of a face, and the rest of him below loose in his flapping
tunic like an odd memory hanging up in white trousers.

That is all I have left of this place, this Topo.

How long have they still been able to defend that scorching
hamlet against the sneaking encroachments of the drab-coloured
river? And are those three flea-ridden huts still standing? And
are new Grappas, unknown Alcides, still training recent recruits
in insubstantial battles? Is simple justice still administered there?
And does the water that you try to drink still taste so sour, so
warm? Warm enough to make you loathe your own mouth for a whole
week after each attempt. ... No ice chest yet? Or how go those
battles of sound between the flies and the ceaseless buzzing
of quinine in one's ears? Sulphate? Hydrochloride? And any-
how, are there still any niggers there to parch and rot in that
oven? Perhaps not.

Perhaps nothing of all that remains; perhaps the Little Congo
has flipped Topo away entirely with one lick of its great muddy
tongue, one stormy night, quite casually and by the way, and
now it is all over, all completely gone, even the name itself
wiped off the maps; maybe there's only me left to remember
Alcide at all.... Forgotten even by his little niece.... Lieu-
tenant Grappa may never have seen his Toulouse again.... And
the forest which always, from time immemorial, had its eye on
the sand dunes, when the rainy season came around again, may
have obliterated everything under the shade of its giant cedars,
even those tiny unexpected flowers which Alcide wouldn't let me
water. ... All of it may have gone.

As for those ten days going up the river, I shall long remember
them. They were spent in the bows of the canoe looking out for
muddy whirlpools, choosing one cautious passage after another
between tremendous floating branches, which we nimbly avoided.
Straining like convicts making a dash for it.

At sundown each day we'd make a halt on some rocky promontory.
Finally one morning we left our foul canoe and struck into the
forest, up a hidden track which squirmed its way into the damp
green gloom, lit only by an occasional ray of sunlight which
fell from the topmost vaultings of this vast cathedral of leaves.
Monster fallen trees forced us frequently to detour. Where
their roots had been, an entire Metro could have shunted about
with ease.

All of a sudden the blazing light came back to us. We had come
to the edge of a clearing, and there was further to climb, an
added effort. The rise we topped dominated the measureless forest
rippling with yellow, red and green summits, clothing, blotting
over, hills and valleys, as terrifically abundant as the sky or
sea. The man whose habitation we were looking for lived, they
explained to me by signs, still a bit further on ... in another
little dip of the land. There we found him, waiting for us.

He had made himself a sort of native hut between two great rocks,
sheltered, he pointed out to me, from the eastern gales, the
worst, the most destructive. I was quite willing to admit that at
least that was an advantage, but as to the hut itself, surely it
belonged to the last, most tumble-down category of hut, a dwelling
place almost in theory only, dilapidated on every side. Certainly
I had been expecting something of that sort in the way of an
abode, but the reality surpassed my expectations.

I must have struck the chap as very disgruntled, for he spoke
to me sharply to rouse me from my reverie. "Listen here, you'd
be worse off in the trenches! Here at least one can get along
somehow. The grub's rotten, true enough, and as for the drink, it's
absolute mud, but you can sleep as much as you like.... There
ain't no guns here, my friend, and no bullets either. You'll find
it'll do, in fact." He spoke in rather the same tone as the general
manager, but his eyes were pale, like Alcide's.

He must be nearing the thirties and he had a beard I had not
looked at him at all carefully when I first arrived, I had been
too overcome by the poverty of these quarters which he was
going to bequeath to me, which were, for years perhaps, to be
my home.... But then I found, on looking at him more closely,
that he had a distinctly adventurous face of very clearly marked
angles; in fact, one of those rebellious heads which come up against
life too sharply instead of letting themselves be carried along by
it, with a great round nose and the prominent cheeks which
meet Destiny halfway, obstreperously. Here was an unlucky man!

"Yes, that's true," I said; "nothing could be worse than the
war!"

That was all for the moment, I volunteered no further remark.
However, it was he who spoke again on the same subject.

"Especially now that they make them so damned long," he
added. "Anyway, all I can say, old man, is that you won't find it
very lively here! There's damn little to do.... It's a sort of
vacation.... Only they'd be fine vacations here, what? Well,
I don't know, I guess it all depends on what a fellow's like him-
self, in temperament...

"What about the water?" I asked. What I could see of it in my
cup, which I had filled myself, made me uneasy; it was yellowish.
I drank some of it; filthy and just as warm as the water in Topo.
Dishwater dregs three days old.

"Is this the water?" The water trouble was going to begin all
over again.

"Yes, that's all there is around here, apart from the rain....
The only thing is, when the rain does come, I'm afraid the shack
won't last long. You see the state it's in?" I saw.

"As for the food," he went on, "it's all tinned stuff. I've been
eating it all the last year ... and I'm not dead yet! In a way
it's pretty convenient, but it doesn't do you any good; the natives,
they eat rotten tapioca, that's their own lookout, they like it....
For the last three months I haven't been able to keep anything
down.... Diarrhea. Maybe a touch of fever as well; I've got
'em both.... Around five o'clock, you know, I see things more
clearly.... And that's why I think I must have the fever,
because with the heat you can't tell, can you; one couldn't very
well be hotter here than one is anyhow, just with the temperature
of the place! So I imagine it's more likely to be these shivers which
would let you know if you were feverish.... And also the fact
that one's rather less bored.... Maybe that too is a matter of
temperament; one could, of course, take spirits to buck oneself
up but personally I don't like liquor ... can't do with it...."

He seemed to set great store by differences of "temperament."

Then, while he was about it, he gave me further engaging details
and advice. "By day it's the heat, but at night it's the noise
that's so unbearable. You wouldn't believe it was possible! Beasts
of prey chasing each other to copulate or kill; I dunno, that's
what they tell me. Anyway, talk about a bloody din! ... And the
noisiest of the lot are the hyenas. They come right close up
to the hut; that's when you'll hear them.... And you can't
mistake it.... It's not like quinine noises; you can sometimes
make a mistake between birds, big flies and quinine ... that's
quite possible. But hyenas laugh like hell. It's your flesh they're
sniffing out ... and that makes them laugh! They're in a hurry
for you to peg out, you know, hyenas.... You can even see
their eyes, so they say.... They're very fond of carcasses....
Personally, I've never looked them in the eye. I'm sorry, in a
way ..."

"It's pretty strange here," I said.

But that wasn't all about the pleasures of night life at
Bikomimbo.

"Then there's the village," he went on; "they're not a hundred
niggers in it, but they kick up enough shindy for ten thousand,
the dirty cows! You'll see, you'll see! Oh, and if you've come out
here for the tom-toms, you've come to the right colony. Because
here, either because there's a moon they beat them, or otherwise
because there isn't a moon ... or else because they're waiting for
the moon. ... In any case it's always something. You'd say they
were in league with the animals to shatter you, the skunks!
Enough to drive you crazy, I tell you. I'd smash the whole lot
of them, the whole damn shoot, if I weren't so tired.... But
I prefer to put cotton wool in my ears. Before, when I still had
some vaseline left in my medicine chest, I put it on it, on the
cotton wool; now I use banana oil instead. It's quite good, banana
oil.... Then they can gargle God's thunder, if they want to,
the dirty sods! I don't give a damn with my ears all bunged up
with cotton wool! Can't hear a thing. These niggers are all dead
and stinking; you'll soon find that out. They squat there all day;
you wouldn't believe them capable of even getting up to go and
piss against a tree, and then as soon as its night, my God! ...
They go all hysterical, all nerves, all bloody-minded. Part of the
night itself gone crazy--that's what the niggers are, I'm telling
you. The set of dirty beggars! Degenerate scum...."

"Do they often come and buy from you?"

"Buy? God, man, be serious! You've got to rob them before they
rob you; that's business, and that's all there is to it! They
don't bother about me at night, anyway--naturally not, with
me with all that cotton wool in my ears! They'd be mutts to
stand on ceremony, don't you agree? And besides, as you see,
I've no doors to my hut either, so of course what d'you think?
They go right ahead. It's a grand life for them here."

"But what about a stock list?" I asked him, quite flabbergasted
by his remarks. "The manager particularly told me to make an
inventory as soon as I arrived, a very careful one."

"As far as I myself am concerned," he then answered me,
perfectly calmly, "the manager can go to hell.... And I have
very great pleasure in telling you so."

"Still, you'll go to see him when you get back to Fort-Gono,
won't you?"

"I shall never see Fort-Gono or the manager again.... The
forest isn't small, my little friend!"

"But then, where will you go?"

"If anybody asks you, you will say you know nothing. But as
you seem interested, allow me, while there is still time, to give
you a bloody good piece of advice. Let the affairs of the Pord-
uriere Company go to the devil, just as they for their part
will see you in hell, and if you're as quick about it as they are,
I assure you here and now that you qualify as a Derby winner!
... You be thankful that I'm leaving you a certain amount of
stock and ask no more of me. As for his stock, if he told you to
take it all over ... you can tell the dear manager that there's
none of it left, and that's that. ... If he won't believe what
you say, well now, that's no great matter either.... We are
all of us looked upon as thieves in any case. So that won't make
the slightest difference to what is said and thought about you,
and just for once it'll bring us in some small profit.... The man-
ager in any case--don't you worry--knows what he's up to bet-
ter than any one, and there's no point in going out of one's
way to contradict him. That's what I think. Do you agree? It's
obvious that to come out here anyway you've got to be capable
of murdering your grandmother! Am I right? Well, then ..."

I wasn't at all convinced of the truth of all this he was telling
me, but in any case this predecessor of mine impressed me at
once as an out-and-out rotter.

I didn't feel at all happy about it, not at all. "Another dirty
break my way," I was telling myself, and felt more and more
convinced of it. I stopped talking to this brigand. In a corner I
discovered, haphazard, the merchandise he was being kind enough
to leave me, a few insignificant bales of cotton.... But on the
other hand native cloth and sandals in dozens, pepper in boxes,
rags, an irrigator, and above all an alarming quantity of tinned
stew, marked "Cassoulet a la Bordelaise" and finally a coloured
picture postcard of "la Place Clichy."

"Near the central post in the hut you will find the rubber and
ivory I bought off the niggers. ... At first I used to take some
trouble about it.... Oh, and here you are, take them--three
hundred francs.... That's the lot."

I didn't know what he meant by that, but I didn't ask him.

"You may do a bit more actual bartering," he said, "because,
you know, money's no earthly good to any one out here; it's
only useful for doing a bunk!"

He burst out laughing. And I didn't want to annoy him just
then in any way, so I followed suit, laughing with him as if I
thought everything was swell.

In spite of the scantiness of his amenities here all these months,
he had gathered about him a very complicated domestic staff, con-
sisting chiefly of little boys who eagerly handed him either the
only household spoon, or his unspeakable tin cup, or neatly ex-
tracted from the soles of his feet the unfailing and inevitable
burrowing jigger bugs. The only labour I saw him personally
undertake was that of scratching himself, which he did, like the
shopkeeper at Fort-Gono, with that marvellous dexterity which
is only to be seen in the colonies.

The furniture he was leaving me showed what could be done
with broken soap boxes in the way of little tables, sideboards
and armchairs. This queer devil also showed me how one could
amuse oneself by flipping away to a great distance, with one
swift movement of the toe, the heavy, scaled caterpillars which
kept clambering up all the time, quivering and sweating, to
besiege our jungle hut. If you are clumsy enough to crush them,
look out for yourself! You are punished by a week's revolting
stench which wafts up slowly from their nasty mess. He had
read somewhere that these flopping horrors were the most ancient
of all created animals. They dated, so he said, from the second
geological period. "When we are as old as they are, my friend,
what sha'n't we smell like?" Just like that.

Sunsets in this African inferno were amazing. They never failed.
A tragedy each evening like a vast assassination of the sun. An
incredible piece of tomfoolery. But it was too staggering for the
admiration of one man alone. For a whole hour the sky preened
itself in great mad streaks of scarlet from end to end, and a green
light flared out in the undergrowth and swirled upwards in flicker-
ing clouds towards the first stars of the night. After that the
whole horizon turned grey, then red once more, but this time
a tired and short-lived red. That then was the end. The colours
all fell back in strips like paper streamers at a carnival. This
happened every day on the stroke of six o'clock.

Night then opened the ball with all its prowling beasts and its
myriad croaking noises.

The forest is only waiting for this signal to start to shake,
whistle and moan in all its depths: like some huge, lecherous,
unlighted railway station, about to burst. Whole trees bristling
with squealing life, voluptuous savagery and horror. We could no
longer hear ourselves speak in the hut. I had to hoot across the
table myself, like an owl, for the other fellow to hear me. I was
out of luck, I who do not like the country.

"What's your name? Didn't you say it was Robinson?" I asked
him.

He was just telling me that the natives in these parts suffered
appallingly from every conceivable illness and that they were in
such a state they couldn't be expected to go in for any sort of
trade. While we talked about the natives, flies and large insects
in swarms came settling down all around the lamp, such clouds
of them that we had to put it out

I saw Robinson's face once more, veiled by this haze of in-
sects, before I put the light out. That perhaps was why his
features impressed themselves more subtly on my memory, when
before they had reminded me of nothing very definite. He went
on talking to me in the dark, while I searched through the past,
using the sound of his voice as a key with which to try locked
doors of many years and months, and finally days, wondering where
I could possibly have met this man before. But I could find
nothing. No voice answered me. You can lose yourself groping
among these twirling forms of memory. It's terrifying how
many people and how many things no longer stir in one's past.
Living people whom one has pushed into the crypts of time
sleep there so soundly with the dead that one same shadow en-
velops and confuses both.

As one grows older, one can't tell which to wake, the living or
the dead.

I was trying to identify this Robinson when, close by in the
night, a sort of hideously exaggerated peal of laughter, made
me start. Then they shut up. He'd told me so, of course; hyenas
presumably.

After that there was nothing but the blacks in the village with
their tom-tom, that senseless beat on hollow wood, gnawing frag-
ments on the wind, like ants.

It was particularly this name of Robinson which worried me,
more and more definitely. We began to talk in our darkness a-
bout Europe and the meals you can have back there, if you've
got some money; and the drink too, such marvellously cool things
to drink! We didn't mention the next day when I should have
to stay here alone, perhaps for years to come, here with all
those tins of cassoulet.... Was the war perhaps preferable then?
Surely it was worse. Oh, yes, much worse! He himself had agreed
on that point. ... He too had been to the war.... And yet he
was leaving this place. He'd had enough of the forest, all the
same. ... I tried to get him to talk about the war again. But
this time he wouldn't.

In the end, when we were going to bed each in his own corner
of this conglomeration of leaves and partitions, he confessed to
me quite frankly that, all things considered, he would rather
come up before a civil court for theft than put up any longer with
the life on a diet of cassoulet which he'd endured here for nearly
a year. A nice lookout for me.

"Haven't you any cotton wool for your ears?" he asked me
once again. "If you haven't, pull some of the fluff off your blanket
and put some banana oil on that. You can make quite good
little stoppings that way. Personally I hate to hear those cows
wailing."

Actually there was every sort of thing in this awful place,
except cows, but he stuck to this unpleasing and generic figure
of speech.

It suddenly struck me that the business of the cotton wool
was probably a cloak to some damnable machination of his. I
couldn't help being seized by a terrible fear that he might start
to murder me there, on my camp bed, before going off with what
was left in the cash box.... The idea petrified me. But what
should I do? Call out? But to whom? Those cannibals in the
village? ... Was I lost? Surely I was, already. Even in Paris,
if one has no money, no debts, and no expectations of wealth, one
barely exists, it's very difficult not to have already disappeared.
... So what about disappearing in this place? Who would take
the trouble to come as far as Bikomimbo even to spit a couple
of times in memory of me, not more than that, even? Nobody,
obviously.

Hours passed in fits and starts. He didn't snore. All these
forest calls and noises made it impossible for me to hear him
breathing. No need for cotton wool. In the end, however, the
name Robinson went on obsessing me until it recalled to my mind
a body, a walk, a voice too, which I had known.... Then, just
when I was really going to fall asleep, the whole person appeared
to me beside my bed, I grasped the image, not of this man, of
course, but of that Robinson of Noirceur-sur-la-Lys, way back
there in Flanders, who had been with me that night when we
were both of us looking for a hole through which to escape from
the war; and then later on the same man in Paris.... Everything
came back to me. Years sped by in a single moment. I had
been very ill in the head, I'd been unhappy.... Now that I
knew, now that I had recognized him, I couldn't help being
thoroughly alarmed. Had he known me? In any case, he could
count on my silence, on my complicity.

"Robinson! Robinson!" I called out gaily, as if I had a piece
of good news for him. "I say, Robinson! Hey there! ..." There
was no answer.

My heart beast fast; I got up, expecting an ugly jab in the
face. Nothing happened. Then, greatly daring, I ventured, grop-
ing my way, to the other end of the hut where his bed was.
He had gone.

I waited for the dawn, striking matches at intervals. Day came
at last in a burst of light, and the negro servants arrived too,
cheerfully offering me their utter uselessness, save only that they
were gay. They were trying to teach me not to care! It was no good
my attempting to indicate to them by carefully thought-out
gestures how much Robinson's disappearance alarmed me; it made
no difference, they didn't seem to give a damn. It is the height
of stupidity, true enough, to concern oneself with anything except
what is actually before one's eyes. In this whole business it was
the cash box I minded about most. But it is unusual ever to see the
person who walks off with a cash box again. That fact made me
think that Robinson would hardly return just for the purpose
of murdering me. That at least was something gained.

So I had the whole place to myself! But I guessed I would have
plenty of time to inspect the inward and outward mysteries of
this immense forest of leaves, this ocean of reds and dappled
yellow, these flamboyant flowering plants, magnificent no doubt
for those who love Nature. I definitely hated it. The glamorous
beauty of the tropics sickened me. The sight of it, my thoughts
about it all, kept returning to me with a taste of nausea. Whatever
any one says, it will always be a country for mosquitoes and
panthers. There's a place for everything.

I preferred to go back to my hut and straighten it up in anti-
cipation of the tornado which could not be long in coming. But,
there again, I had to abandon this attempt at consolidation.
The more commonplace parts of this structure would fall to
pieces but could not be stood upright again. The thatched roof,
infested with vermin, was being riddled away; my house would
not have made even a passable latrine.

I dragged myself around a little way in the bush but was
forced to come back, lie down and shut my eyes, because of
the sun. The sun was always there. Everything is silent, ev-
erything is afraid of being burnt up in the middle of the day;
the least thing is needed; grass, men and beasts are at fever
heat. A midday apoplexy.

My chicken, my one and only chicken, dreaded this noontide
too. He came indoors with me, alone in the world, Robinson's
legacy. Three weeks he lived with me, sharing my walks, following
me about like a dog, clucking incessantly, noticing a snake
under every bush. One day, when profoundly bored, I ate him.
His flesh, bleached by the sun, tasted of nothing at all; it might
have been calico. Perhaps it was he that made me so ill. In any
case, the fact remains that the day after this meal I could not
get up from my bed. About midday, utterly helpless, I dragged
myself across to the medicine chest: there was nothing there but
some iodine and a map of the Nord-Sud Railway. As to customers,
none came to the store, merely a few black loiterers everlastingly
gesticulating and chewing kola, malarial and lubricious. Now
they gathered around me in force; it seemed to me they were
commenting on my ugly mug. I was ill, extremely ill--so much
so that I felt I had no use for my legs at all; they hung over
the edge of the bed, utterly useless and a little comic.

The mail runner from the manager, from Fort-Gono, only brought
me letters stinking with abuse and absurdities--and threats.
Business men, who all think themselves so devilish clever at
their jobs, usually prove in practice to be complete dunder-
heads. My mother way back at home begged me to take care of
my health, as she used to during the war. On the guillotine steps
she would have scolded me for forgetting my muffler. She never
missed a chance of making out that the world is a fine place and
she had done well to conceive me. This supposed Providence is
the subterfuge of maternal carelessness. It was of course perfectly
easy to leave all this chitchat of the Boss and my mother unan-
swered; which I did. But that didn't improve my lot particularly,
either.

Robinson had stolen practically everything this flimsy structure
had contained, and who would believe me if I said so? Should
I write about it? What was the use? To whom? To the Boss?
Every evening regularly about five o'clock I chattered with fever,
a real lively fever, and my bed creaked and shook with it like a
seesaw. The blacks without ceremony had taken possession of my
person and the hut: I hadn't asked them in, but to send them
away was too much of an effort. They wrangled around what was
left of the stock, making a hideous mess out of the barrels of
tobacco, trying on the last few loin cloths, appraising them,
carrying them off, adding still further, if that were possible,
to the general chaos of my home. Rubber scattered all over the
floor mingled its resin with bush melons and those sickly pawpaws
whose taste of piddled-on pears, when I remember it now, fifteen
years later, still makes me retch, I ate so many of them in the
place of beans.

I tried to get some idea of how helplessly low I had sunk, but
I couldn't manage it. "Everybody steals," Robinson had three
times told me before he left. That's what the general manager
thought too. In my fever those words tormented me. "You've
got to manage somehow, look out for yourself," He'd said that
too. I tried to get up. Couldn't do that, either. The water there
was to drink--he was right--it was mud, worse than that,
slimy dishwater dregs. My little blackamoors did indeed bring
me bananas, big ones, little ones and red ones, and those inev-
itable pawpaws, but my stomach revolted so against these
things, against all, all, all of it! I could have brought up the
whole world.

As soon as I felt the least bit better, slightly less bewildered
and battered, that damnable fear took hold of all of me again,--
the fear of having to account to the Porduriere Company. What
should I say to these hard-hearted creatures? How should they
believe me? They'd certainly have me arrested. Then who should
I be judged by? A special group of men armed with frightful
laws deriving their authority from Heaven knows where, like a
court-martial, laws whose real intentions are always kept from
you, judges whose sport is to urge you bleeding along a narrow
track skirting the pit of hell, a road which leads the poor to their
destruction. The Law is misery's great Luna Park--when an
underdog gets caught in it, you can hear him screaming forever
after.

I had rather lie there chattering and sweating with a temperature
of about 104°than have to foresee lucidly what was awaiting
me at Fort-Gono. In the end I took no more quinine, so that the
fever should hide life from me as much as possible. One drugs
oneself with whatever's at hand. While I lay there frothing, days
and weeks, my matches gave out. We hadn't any. Robinson had
really left me nothing at all but cassoulet a la Bordelaise. But of
that, I will say, he had left me plenty. I vomited tins and tins
of the stuff. And even to get that result you had to heat it up.

My shortage of matches brought me one interest in life: I
watched my cook lighting his fire with two flints in the dry
grass. That's when the idea came to me, watching him. I was very
feverish besides and that idea I got took shape, remarkably.
Athough naturally clumsy, after a week of attempts, I too, like a
native, knew how to strike my little spark between two sharp
stones. In fact, I was beginning to be able to get along in the
primitive state. Fire is the most important thing; then there's
hunting, of course, but I had no ambitions that way. My flint
fire was enough for me. I worked away at it hard. I had nothing
else to do all day. I'd become much less proficient at the game
of flipping "secondary age" caterpillars, I still hadn't learnt
the knack of it. I squashed lots of them and got bored. I let them
come in and out of the hut like friends. Two great storms came
along, one after the other, the second lasting three days and
above all three nights. We had rain water to drink in the can
at last. Tepid, of course, but all the same ... The stuffs in
stock began to get sodden in the rain, running into each other,
a ghastly jumble of goods.

The Negroes kindly brought me bundles of lianas from the
forest to make the hut fast to the ground, but in vain; at the
least wind the leaves the partitions were made of flapped madly
above the roof, like broken wings. Nothing was any good. Quite
a party, in fact.

Blacks large and small decided to share my ruin with me, liv-
ing there in complete familiarity. They were enchanted. Great
fun. They came and went about my place (if that's what it was),
as they pleased. Liberty Hall. We made signs to show how well we
understood each other. If it hadn't been for the fever, I might
perhaps have tried to learn their language. I hadn't the time. As
to kindling a fire, though I'd improved, I still had not learnt
their best, their quickest method. The sparks still mostly flew
into my eyes, which made the Negroes laugh a lot.

When I wasn't burning with fever on my camp bed or striking
my primitive lighter, I thought of nothing but the company's
accounts. It's odd how difficult it is to get accustomed to the
idea of irregular dealings. I must have inherited this nervousness
from my mother, who had contaminated me with her principles:
"Little things lead to big things, and opportunity makes the
thief." You learn such ideas too early in life and later on they
come and terrify you, inescapably, at any crisis. What a weakness
it is! Only the force of circumstances has any power to overcome
it. Luckily the force of circumstances is enormous. Meanwhile
we were sinking together, the store and I. We slipped further
into the mud after each downpour, thicker, soupier than the last.
What yesterday had looked like a rock was to-day a treacly mess.
From down-hanging branches tepid rain water pursued and drench-
ed you wherever you went; it lay about the hut and everywhere
around like a dried-up river bed. Everything was melting away
in a welter of trashy goods, hopes and accounts, together with
the fever, itself moist too. The rain struck you so hard that
it was like a warm gag in your mouth. But it didn't stop the
animals chasing each other; after sunset the nightingales be-
gan to make as much noise as the jackals. Anarchy everywhere
and inside the Ark myself, a broken-down Noah. The time
seemed to me come to put a stop to it all.

My mother's sayings were all eminently respectable; she used
to say too, I remembered at just the right moment, when she
was burning old bandages at home, "Fire is the great purifier!"
One's mother provides precepts for all Fate's occasions. It's
a question of choosing the appropriate one.

The moment came. My flints were not very well chosen, they
weren't awfully sharp, the sparks always seemed to burn my
fingers. In the end, however, the first lot of stock caught fire,
in spite of the damp; it was an absolutely sodden package of
socks. All this took place after sundown. Flames spurted eager-
ly upwards at once. The natives came and gathered around the
blaze, yelping with excitement. The crude rubber which Robinson
had bought smouldered away in the middle, its smell reminding me
invincibly of the famous Telephone Building fire on the Quai de
Grenelle, which I'd gone to see with my Uncle Charles, who sang
"Romance" so well. The year before the Exhibition that was, the
Great Exhibition, when I was still a very little boy. Nothing en-
tices memories out of their hiding place as well as fiames and
smells. My hut smelt exactly the same. In spite of being wet
through, it burned to the ground, entirely, merchandise and
all. All accounts were liquidated now. The forest for once was
silent. There was absolute stillness. Owls, leopards, toads and
parrots must have had an eyeful. A blaze is what startles and
impresses them. Like war does us. Now the forest with its
roaring vegetation could sweep down on the debris and take
possession again. I had rescued nothing but my small personal
belongings, my camp bed, the three hundred francs and, of
course, alas, a few tins of cassoulet for the journey.

After an hour's blaze, there was very little left of my shanty.
A few little flames flickering in the rain and a few gurgling
Negroes jabbing about in the ashes with the points of their
spears, amid puffs of that odour of disaster, that odour insep-
arable from all the defeats that have been in this world, the
reek of smoking gunpowder.

Now was the time to beat it, quick. Should I go back to Fort-
Gono, retrace my steps? And there try to explain my behaviour
and what had happened? I hesitated. But not long. There is no-
thing you can explain. The world only knows how to kill you,
turning on you and crushing you as a sleeper kills his fleas.
That would surely be a very stupid sort of way to die, I thought,
the way every one dies. To trust in men is itself to let oneself
be killed a little. I decided, in spite of my condition, to take
to the bush myself, following in the footsteps of Robinson, that
most unlucky man.





ALONG OUR ROAD I WAS CONTINUALLY HEARING THE PLAINTS
AND calls and tremolos of forest creatures, but I practically never
saw any of them, not counting of course the little wild pig I once
nearly stepped on near one of my halting places. One would have
thought from those gusts of squealings, callings and yellings that
all the animals were there in their hundreds and thousands, quite
close to you, around the corner. Yet when you neared the place
their din came from, there were none about except those great
blue parrots, all dolled up in their plumage as if for a wedding,
and so clumsy, coughing and hopping from branch to branch, that
you'd have thought some accident had befallen them.

Nearer the ground, in the mossy undergrowth, large heavy but-
terflies, embroidered like antimacassars, trembled with diffi-
culty in opening their wings, and then, lower down still, there
were we paddling in the yellow mud. We got along only with the
greatest difficulty, especially as the Negroes were carrying me
in a litter made of sacks sown end to end. They could very eas-
ily have slung me into the water when we were crossing a small
swamp. Why didn't they? I found that out later. Or otherwise
couldn't they have eaten me, seeing that that was one of their
customs?

Every now and then I asked the fellows a question. They invar-
iably answered, "Yes, yes." Always eager to agree in fact. A
good-hearted set of chaps. When I wasn't suffering acutely from
diarrhea, the fever took hold of me again at once. You wouldn't
believe how ill I got, going on at that rate. As a matter of fact,
I was beginning not to see at all clearly, or rather I saw every-
thing as green. At night all the wild animals in the world came
and surrounded our camp; we lit a fire. And here and there even
so a cry would pierce the great black vellum smothering us. Some
stricken beast actually calling out to us, since we were near,
in spite of its fear of men and the fire.

By the fourth day I didn't even try to make out what was real
amid the absurd things which the fever sent coursing through
my head, one thing telescoping into another and bits of people
and tail-ends of good resolutions and despairs,--an endless
stream.

All the same, I tell myself, when I think back on it, surely
that bearded white man whom we came across one morning
standing on a pebbly promontory where two rivers met,--surely
he was real? And you could hear a terrific din of near-by rapids,
I remember. He looked the same sort of man as Alcide, but he was
a Spanish sergeant. Wandering more or less at random from one
jungle track to another, we had landed up in Rio del Rio, a colony
long in the possession of the Crown of Castile. My poor Spanish
soldier also had a hut. I believe he laughed a good deal when I
told him all about my horrible hut and what I'd done with it in
the end. His looked a little more presentable, I admit, but not
much. His own particular torment was red ants. They'd seen fit
to make a pathway for their annual migrations slap across the
middle of his hut, the little brutes, and for two months they
hadn't stopped coming through.

They took up nearly all the room; it wasn't easy to move about
and besides, if you got in their way, they stung you sharply.

He was immensely pleased when I gave him some of my tinned
stew, because he himself hadn't eaten anything but tomato for
three years. It was all right with me. I knew all about that. He'd
already consumed more than three thousand tins of it on his own,
so he told me. He was tired of serving it up in different ways
and now he simply gulped down his tomato with the least possible
fuss, through two little holes bored in the tin, like a raw egg.
As soon as the red ants got to know that a stock of new food
had arrived, they mounted guard around the cassoulet stew. You
couldn't have left a single tin about, open; they'd have called the
entire race of red ants into the hut in no time. Nothing's more
communist than a red ant. And they'd have gobbled up the
Spaniard as well.

I learned from my host that the capital of Rio del Rio was
called Santa Tapeta, a city and harbour well known along the
whole of the coast as a supply station for ships bound for dis-
tant ports.

The track we'd been following actually led there. We were on the
right road; all we had to do was to carry on along it another
three days and three nights. Wanting to ease my delirium, I
asked this Spaniard whether he knew of any good native medicine
which might put me right. My head was in a terrible way. But
he wouldn't have anything at all to do with any bugaboo of that
sort. For a Spanish colonizer he was strangely Africanophobe--
so much so that when he went to the lavatory, he wouldn't use
banana leaves, but kept instead his own special stock of Heral-
dos de Madrid, which he cut up for this purpose. He never read
a paper now, either; just like Alcide in that too.

Three years he'd been living there alone with the ants, a few
little idiosyncrasies, and his old newspapers--as well as that
terrible Spanish accent which is like somebody else in the room,
it's so strong. So he wasn't easily roused by anything. When he
yelled at his niggers, though, it sounded like a thunderstorm;
Alcide was nowhere compared to him, in the matter of lung power.
In the end I gave this Spaniard all my cassoulet, I took such a
liking to him. In grateful return he made me out a very beauti-
ful passport on handmade paper stamped with the Royal arms of
Spain and one of those marvellously elaborate signatures which
it took him ten careful minutes to complete.

There was no missing the road to Santa Tapeta; he was quite right,
you simply followed your nose. I don't in the least remember how
we got there, but I'm quite sure of one thing, which is that
as soon as I arrived I was handed over to a priest, who was so
meek himself that just having him about made me feel strong
and capable by comparison. But not for long.

The town of Santa Tapeta was stuck on the side of a rock dir-
ectly facing the sea and you've no idea how green it was. A
marvellous sight it must have been, as seen from the roadstead;
sumptous and grand from a distance, but when you came down
to it, nothing but overworked carcasses baking and rotten, just
the same as at Fort-Gono. As for the Negroes of my little safari,
when once a lucid moment came to me, I packed them off home.

They'd come through a great hunk of jungle and were frightened
for their lives on the return journey, so they said. They wept about
it a lot, but personally I wasn't feeling strong enough to be sorry
for them. I'd been too ill and sweated too much. My illness went
on and on. There seemed to be no end to it.

As far as I can remember from then onwards, a lot of chatter-
ing people (the township seemed to be full of them) came
bustling night and day about my sick bed, which had been rigged
up in the vestry on purpose, because all forms of diversion were
rare in Santa Tapeta. The priest filled me up with tisanes, a
long gold cross waggled on his stomach, and deep down somewhere
under his soutane there was a great clinking of money whenever
he came near my bed. But there was no longer any question of
entering into conversation with all these people; even mumbling
had become an intolerable effort to me.

I really believed I was finished; I tried just to have one more
look at what could be seen of this world through the cure's win-
dow. I shouldn't dare to say that I could describe that garden
now without making gross and absurd mistakes. Sun there was,
that's certain; always there, as if a great furnace were forever
being opened right in your face; and below that more sun, and
rows and rows of those fantastic trees, sort of bursting lettuces
the size of oaks, and a kind of dandelion, three or four of which
would make a perfectly good chestnut tree back at home. Throw
in as well a toad or two, as fat as spaniels, waddling desperately
from one thicket to the next....

It's by smells that people, places, and things come to their end.
A whiff up one's nostrils is all that remains of past experiences.
I shut my eyes because I really couldn't keep them open any
longer. Whereupon night after night the acrid odour of Africa
faded from me. I found it harder and harder to recognize its
mixed stench of decayed soil, private parts, and powdered
saffron.

There was time, and the past, and still more time, and then
came a moment when I underwent a number of new twists and
shocks and after that a rocking more gentle and regular, as
if I were in a cradle....

I was on my back still. That much was certain. But now it
was on something that was moving. ... I let myself slip and
then I vomited and woke up again and once more fell asleep.
We were at sea. I felt so queasy that I barely had the strength
to hold the new smell of tar and rigging. It was cool in the
unsteady corner where I'd been put in a heap under a wide-open
ventilator. They'd left me entirely alone. We were still tra-
velling, apparently. But what voyage was this? I could hear
footsteps on the wooden deck above my nose, and voices, and
the sound of waves slapping and breaking against the ship's
side.

It is very seldom that life returns to your bedside, wherever
you may be, except in the form of some damnable cad's trick. For
instance, the trick these people in Santa Tapeta had played on me!
Had they not taken advantage of my condition to sell me on the
quiet, just as I was, to a galley? A beautiful galley for sure, I
admit, stately in build, well rowed, crowned with lovely sails of
purple hue, a gallant golden craft, beautifully upholstered in the
officers' quarters, with, forward, a fine portrait in cod-liver oil
of the Infanta Conita in polo costume. This princess, they told
me, had given the ship the patronage of her name, her swelling
breasts and her royal reputation. Flattering thought!

After all, I thought, when I considered what had befallen me,
suppose I had stayed at Santa Tapeta, I was as ill as a dog,
anyway, and should surely have died at that priest's where the
Negroes had left me.... What if I'd gone back to Fort-Gono? In
that case, I certainly shouldn't get off with under fifteen years
on the score of those lost balance sheets.... Where I was at
the moment, we were at any rate on the move and there was
some hope even in that.... Come to think of it, the captain of the
Infanta Conita had done a bold thing in buying me, even dirt
cheap, from that priest of mine when we weighed anchor. The
captain had risked all his money in that transaction. He could
have lost the whole lot.... He'd speculated on the sea air putting
me right. He deserved his reward. And he'd get it too, because I
was feeling much better already, and I could see that he was very
pleased about it. I still raved dreadfully but there was a certain
amount of logic in my delirium. ... As soon as I opened my
eyes, the captain came to see me in my lair, wearing his plumed
hat. That's how he looked to me.

It amused him a lot to see me trying to lift myself on my
paillasse in spite of the grip the fever had on me. I'd vomit.
"Well, you scum, you'll soon be able to row with the others,"
he said to me. That was nice of him; he roared with laughter,
tapping me gently with a cat-o'-nine-tails, but in a very
friendly way, on the nape of the neck, not on the backside.
He wanted me to be happy and to share his pleasure at the
excellent bargain he'd made in acquiring me.

The food on board seemed to me to be admirable. Though I
couldn't stop muttering, quite soon I was strong enough, as the
captain had foretold, to go and row with the other men from time
to time. But where there were only ten of them, I saw a hundred:
my eyesight was weak.

One didn't get tired on this crossing because most of the time
our sails carried us along easily. We were no worse off in our
quarters between decks than ordinary third-class passengers in a
railway carriage over the week-end, and far less dangerously placed
than I had been on the Admiral Bragueton coming out. We were
often becalmed for long stretches at a time on this journey from
East to West across the Atlantic. The glass dropped. No one
minded about that between decks. We only felt it was all rather
slow. Personally, I had seen enough fine views of the sea and the
jungle to last me through eternity.

I should have liked to ask the captain one or two questions
about where we were going and why, but now that I was feeling
definitely better, he'd stopped taking any interest in how I was
getting on. Besides which, I still talked too wildly to indulge
in serious conversation. I now only caught sight of him in the
distance,--like a real boss.

I started to try and find Robinson on board among the other
galley slaves, and several times in the silent hours at night, I
called out his name at the top of my voice. There was no answer,
except a threat and a curse or two, in that black hole of Calcutta.

Still, the more I considered the incidents and circumstances of
my adventure, the more probable it seemed to me that he had had
the Santa Tapeta trick played on him too. Only it must be on
some other galley that Robinson was rowing at this moment. The
niggers must all have had a hand in the business. One at a time,
that's how it's always done. One's got to live, so the people and
things you're not going to devour at once you take away and sell.
The comparative kindness which those Negroes had shown me
stood revealed in the nastiest possible light.

The Infanta Conita sailed on for weeks and weeks across the
seasick Atlantic rollers, and then one fine evening everything
suddenly became calm. I was no longer delirious. We were bobbing
about at anchor. Next morning when we woke up, we realized on
opening the portholes that we had arrived at our destination. What
an incredible sight!





TALK ABOUT A SURPRISE! WHAT WE SAW SUDDENLY THROUGH
THE fog was so astonishing that at first we wouldn't believe it was
true, and then, standing there bang in front of it all, galley slaves
that we were, we had to laugh, seeing it jutting right up in front
of us like that....

Understand that it went straight up in the air, quite straight,
that town of theirs. New York is a town standing up. Of course
we'd seen plenty of towns in our time, fine ones at that, and famous
cities and seaports and all. But at home, dammit, cities lie on their
sides along the coast or on a river bank; they lie flat in the
landscape, awaiting the traveller--whereas this American one, she
didn't relax at all; she stood there very stiff, not languid in the
least, but stiff and forbidding.

It seemed damned funny to us; we laughed and laughed. It can't
help being funny, a town built straight up in the air like that.
But we could only laugh above the neck, because of the cold
blowing in just then from the open sea, through a great grey and
pink mist, quickly and sharply attacking our pants and the chinks
in this city wall in front of us. The streets of the city these
were, where the clouds took refuge, too, from the wind. Our ship
had its narrow berth on the edge of some jetties where a dung-
coloured stream swirled about a nagging string of little rowboats
and eager, hooting tugs.

For a down-and-out it's never a particularly pleasant business
landing anywhere, but for a galley slave it's harder still, espe-
cially as these people in America hate galley slaves coming in from
Europe. "They're all anarchists," they say. What it is, they don't
let anybody in who is merely curious and unlikely to bring them
in a bit of cash, because all the currencies of Europe are sons of
the Dollar.

I might perhaps have tried, as others had successfully before
me, to swim across the harbour and once I was on the quay to
start shouting "Long live the Dollar! Long live the Dollar!" Its one
way of doing it. Lots of chaps have landed that way and afterwards
made their fortunes. So they say; you can't really tell. Odder
things still occur to you in dreams. Personally I had another
scheme in my head, along with the fever.

Having become very good on board at counting fleas (not
only catching them, but adding them up and subtracting them,
in the way of statistics I mean), I wanted to make use of this
intricate craft of mine, which you mightn't think amounted to
much but which does possess, when all's said and done, a tech-
nique of its own. You can say what you like about the Americans,
but in these matters of technique they win, hands down. They'd
be crazy about my way of counting fleas, I was positive of that.
As I saw it, the thing was a cinch.

I was going to offer them my services at once, but just then
our ship was ordered to its quarantine station in a little creek
near-by. It was a sheltered place within hailing distance of a
small, closed-in village in the centre of a quiet bay, two miles
or more from New York.

And there we all stayed, under observation, for weeks and weeks
--long enough to get quite accustomed to the place. And every
evening after supper, a squad pushed off from the Infanta Conita
to go and fetch our water supply from the village. And I had to
be in it, so as to accomplish the end I had in view.

The other chaps knew what I was driving at, but it wasn't their
idea of fun at all. "He's mad," they said, "but harmless." We
weren't badly fed on board our tub, the lads had a bit of an eye
kept on them but only up to a certain point--in fact, it was
pretty well all right. A passable job. Besides which and best of
all, they were never discharged from service and the king had
even promised them a sort of little pension at the age of sixty-
two. This prospect kept them cheerful; it was something to dream
about, and furthermore, on Sundays, so as to feel they were free
men, they would play at having the vote.

During all the time we were in quarantine they raised the
devil of a racket between decks and fought and buggered about
in turn. And then too, what really stopped them running away
along with me was chiefly that they didn't care a damn about
these United States which I was so thrilled about. Every one has
his own dislikes; America was their bete noire. They even tried
to put me off it completely. It was no good my telling them that
I knew people in the place--among others my little Lola, who
must be very well off these days and no doubt Robinson too,
who'd probably have made his way in business here by now; they
wouldn't budge from their dislike of America, their disgust, their
hatred for it. "You'll always be cracked," they said to me. One day
I pretended I was going along to the village pump with them and
then I told them; I said, "I'm not going back to the ship. So long!"
They were a decent lot of chaps at heart, a hard-working crowd,
and they told me all over again that they didn't at all approve
of what I was doing, but they wished me good health and good
luck all the same and joy of it too--though they had their own
way of putting it.

"Go ahead!" they said to me. "Go right ahead--but let us tell
you once more, big boy; you're a down-and-out and you're making
a big mistake! Your fever's sending you crazy. You'll come back
from that America of yours a damn sight worse off than we are!
It's your lousy tastes that'll be the end of you! Out to learn
something new, aren't you? You know a whole heap too much
already, considering what you are!"

It was no good my telling them I had friends in the place who'd
be pleased to see me. They didn't understand.

"Friends?" is all they said. "Friends, eh? Your friends'll see
you in hell, that's what. They forgot all about you a long time
ago!"

"But I want to see these Americans, I tell you," I said, but it
made no difference. "Why, they've got the most marvellous women
in the world here...."

"Aw, come back with us, man," they went on. "There's no point
in going, we keep telling you. You'll only get more sick than you
are already! We'll tell you right now what the Americans are like,
if you want to know! They are all either millionaires or scum--
nothing in between! And the way you are now, you're not going
to see much of the millionaires.... But scum, my God, you'll
get plenty of that sure enough. And right from the word 'Go';
don't you worry...."

That's the way these fellows took it. They got on my nerves at
last, these little rats, the poor fish, the sissies. "Go to hell,
all of you!" was what I said to them. "You just babble because
you're jealous, that's all. We'll see whether the Americans knock
me over the head or not! Leave that to me. But there's no doubt
about one thing--which is that you may look like men but you're
not, you're not men between the legs at all, d' you hear? You're
a lot of silly little runts, that's what!" Let them have it straight,
I did. Then I felt fine.

Night was coming on so they were whistled for from the ship.
They started to row back in unison, all the lot except one--me.
I waited until I couldn't hear them any more, then I counted up
to a hundred and after that I ran as fast as I could go to the vil-
lage. The village was a charming little place with lights shining
and a lot of wooden shacks, standing empty on both sides of a cha-
pel, in complete silence; but I was shivering with malaria and
also with fear. Here and there one met a sailor from the garri-
son who didn't seem to have anything much on his mind and there
were even children about and a young girl with marvellous musc-
les. The U.S.A.! I had arrived. That's what it does you good to
clap eyes on after wandering about so long and getting so dried
up. It makes life juicy again, like a fruit. I'd dropped into the
one village which wasn't any good, though. A small garrison of
sailors and their families looked after it and saw to the upkeep
of all these buildings, in readiness for the day when a raging
plague should come along on some boat like ours and threaten
the great port of New York.

It was in these buildings that as many foreigners as possible
would be killed off so that the people in the town shouldn't catch
anything. They even had a cemetery all ready to hand and full of
flowers. They were waiting. For sixty years they'd been waiting,
doing nothing but just wait.

I found a little empty hut, sneaked into it and fell asleep at
once. Next morning the alleys were full of sailors wearing short
jackets, as square-shouldered and well-built as anything, playing
about with brooms and whirling a hose around my retreat and on
all the grass plots in their theoretical village. It was no good my
pretending to look detached; I was so famished that I couldn't
help hovering around a place where there was the smell of
cooking.

It was there that I was nabbed and run in between two sailors
determined to identify me. Immediately the question arose of
whether to sling me into the water and drown me or not. They
rushed me into the presence of the Chief Quarantine Officer, and
there, although constant adversity had taught me a certain amount
of nerve, I cut a pretty sorry figure: I still felt too feverish to
risk any sparkling sally. No, I beat a retreat: my heart wasn't in
the game.

It was better to faint. Which I did. In that office, when later I
regained consciousness, the place of the men around me had been
taken by ladies in white, who put me through a vague and kindly
catechism which I should have thought met the case very nicely.
But kindliness in this world does not last, and next day the men
began to talk to me again about prison. For my part, I took this
opportunity to talk to them about fleas--just like that, quite
casually. ... I said I knew how to catch them ... how to count
them ... that that was my job, and I could also make out accurate
statistics of the various groups of parasites. I could see
at once that my manner interested them, made them observe me
more closely.... They were listening to me, but as to believing
me, that was quite another kettle of fish.

Then along came the officer in charge of the whole station. He
was called the "Surgeon-General"--which would make a splendid
name for a fish. He was tough in his manner but showed greater
decision than the others. "What's this you're telling us, my boy,"
he said, "about knowing how to count fleas? Come, come." He was
making a great to-do about it to put me off my stroke. But I at
once let him have the little harangue I had prepared. "I believe
in the numbering of fleas! I believe it to be a civilizing factor,
because numeration is the basis of statistical data of incalculable
value! A progressive country ought to know the number of its
fleas, divided according to sex, subdivided according to age, by
years and seasons... "

"Come, come, young man, that'll do!" the surgeon-general broke
in, "We've had a lot of scallywags from Europe here before you
who've spun us yarns of that sort and then turned out to be anar-
chists, like all the others, worse than the others. They didn't
even believe in anarchy! Cut it out, see? To-morrow we'll try you
out on the immigrants over on Ellis Island, in the bathhouse. Major
Mischief, my second in command, will tell me if you've been lying
or not.... For two months now, Major Mischief has been clamouring
for an official flea-counter. You can go to him for a trial. Now
get out! And if you've pulled our legs, you'll be shot into the
sea. Go on, beat it now! And look to yourself!"

So I "beat it" from the presence of American authority, as 1
had beaten it before from so many other authorities; by showing
him first my front view and next, with a rapid right-about turn,
my backside, accompanying the whole thing with a military salute.
I figured that this statistics method would be as good as any
other for landing me in New York. Next morning, Mischief, the
major in question, explained to me in a few brief words what
there was for me to do; he was a fat, yellow man, as short-sighted
as he well could be, and he wore dark glasses. He must have
taken me in as wild beasts recognize their prey, by general
appearance, because to make out details would have been impos-
sible with spectacles like the ones he had on.

We fixed up about the job without any difficulty and I even
think that by the end of my stay old Mischief had taken quite a
fancy to me. Not to be able to see anybody is a good reason to
start with for liking people; besides which, my astonishingly
facile way of catching fleas quite enchanted him. I hadn't my equal
in the whole station for shutting up in boxes the most restive, the
hairiest, the most impatient fleas of all. I was able to choose
them according to their sex on the immigrants themselves.

It was a terrific task, I can assure you. Mischief in the end came
to have an implicit trust in my dexterity.

By the evening I'd have crushed so many fleas that the nails
of my forefinger and thumb were terribly bruised and even then I
wasn't through, as there was still the most important part of my
job to be done: drawing up the day's record. Polish fleas in one
column, Yugoslav fleas in another ... Spanish fleas ... Crimean
crabs ... Peruvian lice ... I had at the tip of my finger nails all the
crawling, biting things that thrive on broken-down humanity. A
labour obviously at once both meticulous and monumental. Our
figures were checked over in New York, in a special office fit-
ted with electrical flea-counting machines. Every day the good
little tug Quarantine crossed the harbour from end to end,
carrying our figures over there to be queried or filed.

And so many days went by, I began to feel stronger but as my
temperature and the delirium slipped from me in my present
comfortable state, a desire for fresh adventure and new worlds
to conquer returned to me, and soon became imperative. With a
temperature of 98.4° things became dull and banal again.

Still I could have quite well have stayed on there indefinitely
in peace, and well-fed from the station kitchen--especially as
Major Mischief's daughter (I can remember her still, superb in
her fifteen summers) used to come and play tennis at five, in
extremely short skirts, before our office windows. Finer legs
I've seldom seen--a bit masculine perhaps, yet even so somehow
more delicate--a vision of budding young flesh, an absolute chal-
lenge to happiness, an exclamation of promised delight. The young
naval ensigns of the post never left her side for a moment.

They didn't have to justify themselves by useful work like I
did, the young scamps! I watched their every gesture and caper
around my little idol and paled several times a day as I watched.
In the end I told myself that perhaps I too might pass in the dark
for a sailor. I was still harbouring this hope when one Saturday,
after I'd been there twenty-three weeks, there was a sudden turn
in the tide of events. An Armenian colleague of mine, who was in
charge of the statistics sloop, was suddenly promoted to an official
flea-counting post in Alaska, to deal with the gold prospectors'
dog teams.

That was a leg up in the world for him if ever there was one.
Naturally he was overjoyed. Huskies are of course valuable an-
imals. You can't do without them. They're awfully well looked
after. Whereas immigrants can go to the devil--there are always
too many more where they came from.

As now there was nobody on hand to carry our lists to New York,
it didn't take them long at the office to appoint me. My boss
Mischief shook me by the hand when I left for the shore, telling
me to behave well and sensibly while I was in town. It was the
last piece of advice this honest man ever gave me and, just as he
had never seen me to date, he never saw me again. As soon as we
landed, the rain lashed fiercely down on us, soaking through my
thin suit and washing away the statistics I held in my hand. Some,
however, I'd kept in a good thick wallet sticking out of my pocket,
so as to look as much like a business man in the city as possible,
and off I dashed, full of fear and excitement, towards new adven-
tures. Lifting up my nose towards these bulwarks, I felt an upside-
down sort of giddiness, because there were really too many windows
up there and they were all so much alike everywhere you looked
that one felt sickened by them.

Thinly clothed as I was, I hurried shivering towards the darkest
gap I could see in all this giant facade, hoping that the passersby
would hardly notice me in their midst.

But I needn't have felt ashamed. There was nothing to bother
about. The street I had chosen was easily the narrowest of all,
no wider than a fair-sized stream at home would have been, heav-
ily silted at the bottom, very damp and very dark: so many other
people, both large and small, were already walking along it, that
they carried me with them like a shadow. They were journeying
up to town like me, going to their work, no doubt, with their
noses to the ground. Here, too, they were the usual poor.





AS THOUGH I KNEW WHERE I WAS GOING, I PRETENDED TO CHOOSE
again and changed my direction. I took another, better-lit turning
on my right; "Broadway" it was called; I read it's name written up.
High above the topmost storeys was the day, in little crumbs and
particles of sky. But we went along in the twilight below, as
sickly as that of the forest and so grey that the street was full
of it, like so much dirty cotton waste.

Like a running sore this unending street, with all of us at the
bottom of it, filling it from side to side, from one sorrow to
the next, moving towards an end no one has ever seen, the end of
all the streets in all the world.

There was no wheeled traffic passing along it, only people and
more people.

It was the valuable district, they told me later, the home of
gold: Manhattan. You only enter it on foot, like entering a church.
It is the very core of the banking centre of the world to-day.
Yet some men spit in it as they go along. You need a nerve.

It is a quarter filled with gold, a miracle indeed, and you can
even hear this miracle through closed doors, its din of jingled
dollars, the Dollar which is always too light, a veritable Holy
Ghost, more precious than blood itself.

All the same, I had time to go and see them; I went in and
talked with the employees who guard the bullion. They are sad
and underpaid.

When the faithful enter their bank, you mustn't think they can
take what they want for themselves as they please. Not at all.
They communicate with Dollar, murmuring to Him through a little
grille; in fact, they make their confession. Very little noise,
dim light, a tiny guichet set between lofty columns, that is all.
They do not swallow the Host. They lay it against their heart. I
couldn't stay there long admiring them, I had to be following the
crowds in the street between those flat, shadowy walls.

All of a sudden our street widened, like a canon ending in an
open space. You found yourself before a lake of glaucous light
set in a ring of monstrous houses. And right in the middle of this
clearing was a little pavilion, with a kind of rural air, surrounded
by unhappy lawns.

I asked several people near me in the crowd what this building
was that one could see over there, but most of them pretended
not to have heard. They had no time to lose. One young passerby,
however, was good enough to inform me that it was the Town Hall,
a relic of colonial days, he said, simply stiff with historical
interest ... which had been left there. The outskirts of this
oasis formed a square, with benches in it, which were good enough
to see the Town Hall from, if one sat down. When I arrived,
there was very little else to see.

I stayed a full hour in this place and then from out this gloom,
this jogging, disjointed, mournful crowd, there surged towards
noon, a sudden avalanche of absolutely lovely women!

What a discovery! What an America! What delight! Oh, memory
of Lola! As a type she'd not deceived me. It was true!

I was getting to the quick of my pilgrimage. And if I had not
at the same time felt frequent pangs of hunger, I should have
believed myself to have reached a moment of unearthly asthetic
inspiration. These beauties I was discovering could, with a little
confidence and comfort, have ravished me from my trivial condi-
tion of humanity. Indeed, all I lacked was a sandwich to be con-
vinced that it was all the sheerest miracle. But how I lacked that
sandwich!

But still, what suppleness, what grace! What unbelievable deli-
cacy of features! What a treasure trove of harmony! What daring
tints--always, invariably successful! Every possible masterpiece
of face and figure among so many blondes! And all these brun-
ettes, these red-heads too! And the more there were of them,
the more kept on arriving. ... Is Greece reborn perhaps, I
asked myself? I'd happened along at just the right moment!

They struck me as all the more divine, these apparitions, be-
cause they appeared to be entirely unaware of my presence, my
existence, as I sat there close beside them on my bench, goggling
in the fullness of my erotico-mystical admiration, silly with quinine
and also, one must admit, with hunger. If it were possible to come
out of one's skin, I should have been out of mine then and there,
once and for all. There was nothing to hold me back.

They could have carried me off, these unreal office girls, could
have sublimated me, with only a gesture, with but one word, and I
should have sailed away at once, all of me, into the world of
dreams.But no doubt they had other business to attend to.
An hour, two hours passed in this way, this stupefaction. I
hoped for nothing more.

I had to be careful, come down to earth, and not blow my small
reserve of money all at once. I hadn't much, I didn't even dare
to count it. I couldn't have, anyway, I was seeing double. I could
only feel it there, thin, shrinking notes in my pocket, along with
my incomplete statistics.

Men went by too, mostly young men, with wooden, pink faces,
a dry, monotonous look, and chins one couldn't get used to, they
were so large and vulgar.... Still, no doubt that's how their
women like their chins to be. The sexes seemed to keep each to
itself in the street. The women looked mostly only at the shop
windows, taken up by the attraction of handbags, scarves and
little silken things, shown very few at a time in each window, but
definitely and exactly displayed. You didn't find any old people
in this crowd. Nor couples either. No one seemed to think it at
all odd that I should be sitting there hour after hour, watching
the people pass. But, at a given moment, the policeman standing
like an ink-pot in the middle of the road began to suspect me of
being up to something very odd. It was obvious.

Wherever you are, as soon as you begin to attract the attention
of authority to yourself, the thing to do is to hop it, quick.
Don't stop and explain. "Out of sight!" I said to myself.

Just to the right of my bench, as a matter of fact, there was a
great wide hole in the middle of the pavement, rather like our
Metro at home. This hole seemed to me just the thing, huge as it
was, with stairs inside all of pink marble. I had already seen quite
a number of people disappear down it from the street and come
out again. It was in this subterranean resort that they went about
Nature's needs. I was struck dumb at once. All marble too was
the hall below where these things were going on. A sort of swim-
ming bath, but not emptied of all its water, a horrible swimming
bath, filled only with a filtered, dying daylight fading on the
backs of unbuttoned men, red in the face in the midst of their own
stinks, as they attended to their dirty business in public, to an
accompaniment of frightful noises.

Among men, that way, without fuss, and to the tune of laughter
and encouragements from all around, they settled down to it as to
a game of football. You take off your coat right away as you come
in, as though for strenuous exercise. One dresses the part, in fact,
for the thing's a rite. And so, completely at their ease, belching
and worse, gesticulating like madmen, they install themselves in
a closet. Fresh arrivals have a thousand dirty pleasantries ad-
dressed to them as they come downstairs from the street; yet they
all appear enchanted.

The stricter, the more mournful even, the behaviour of these
men out there in the street, the more the prospect of having to
empty their bowels in tumultuous company appears to solace and
inwardly delight them.

The closet doors, mostly smudged and dirty, swung loose,
wrenched from their hinges. You wandered from one little cell
to the next, to crack some joke, while those who were waiting for
a vacancy smoked heavy cigars and tapped the shoulder of each
occupant as he travailed, bowed head between his hands. Many
groaned like wounded men or women in labour. The constipated
were threatened with ingenious tortures.

When a flush of water announced the end of a session, the din
redoubled around the unoccupied pan, and often it was tossed
for, heads or tails. The newspapers they read, although as thick
as cloth, were instantly torn asunder by this eager gang. You
could hardly see their faces through the smoke. I didn't dare
go near them because of their smell.

This contrast was well calculated to disconcert a foreigner. Here
all this easy shamelessness, this stupendous intestinal familiarity,
and then out there on the street that absolute restraint! I was
utterly nonplussed. I went up the same steps into the daylight
and sank back onto the same bench. Sudden vulgar, digestive
debauchery and discovery of a joyous communism in filth: I
disregarded each of these baffling aspects of the same question.
I hadn't the strength to analyse them, to find their synthesis.
Sleep was what I needed most of all. Oh, rare, delicious urge to
sleep!

So I joined in the procession of passers-by up one of the ad-
joining streets; we went along in jerks because each shop win-
dow disturbed the flow of the crowd. There was an hotel entrance
there, making an eddy on the pavement. People spurted out of
its revolving doors into the crowd and I was caught up and flung
the other way into a vast vestibule.

Bewildering at first. ... You had to guess at it all, to imagine
the grandeur of it, the majesty of its proportions, because
everything went on beneath lights so shaded that one only grew
accustomed to it after a little while. There were a great number
of young women in this twilight, sunk in armchairs as in so many
shells. Men, silent and attentive, passed around them to and
fro, a little way off, timidly and inquisitively, just out of range
of crossed legs displaying magnificent heights of silk. It seemed
to me that these young women sat there awaiting events of extreme
importance and costliness. Clearly their thoughts were not of me.
And I in my turn passed by, most furtively, before this long and
palpable temptation.

Since there were at least a hundred of these haughty, half-recum-
bent bodies set in a single line of chairs, I reached the recep-
tion desk in a dream, having absorbed so much too strong a dose
of loveliness for the man I was that I staggered as I walked.
At the desk a pomaded clerk roughly offered me a room. I chose
the smallest in the hotel. I couldn't have had more than about
fifty dollars in my possesion at that moment, few thoughts
left in my head and absolutely no confidence at all.

I hoped it really was the smallest room in all America the clerk
was offering me, as his hotel, the Gay Calvin, was advertised
on its posters as the most luxuriously appointed of all the
leading hotels on the whole continent.

Above me, what an infinity of furnished suites! And near-by
in those armchairs, what rows of invitations to the rape! What
pitfalls! What perils! Is there then no end to the aesthetic trials
of the pauper? An agony more obstinate than hunger? But I hadn't
the time to succumb to them, for the reception clerk had already
given me a key, lying heavy in my hand. I didn't dare budge.

A pert little boy dressed like some very young brigadier general
sprang out at me from the shadows; a commander to be implicitly
obeyed. The sleek reception clerk rang his bell three times,
my bell-hop started to whistle. I was being packed off.
Away we went.

First along a corridor, at a great lick, we forged, determined
and in darkness like an underground train. The kid was leading.
Around a corner, a bit farther, then another. Going fast enough.
We banked a bit.... Right, here's the elevator. Zup! Is this it?
No, another corridor. Darker still, ebony panelling the whole way,
I thought; I hadn't time to examine it. The little lad whistled
away, carrying my flimsy suit case. I didn't dare ask him anything.
We had to get on, I was well aware of that. In the darkness
here and there, as we went along, a red or green electric light
glowed an order. Long splashes of gold were the doors. We had
long ago passed the 1800's and then the 3000's, yet we went on,
urged ever forward by our same invisible destiny. He rushed after
the unknown in the darkness, this glinting bell-hop, as if by
instinct. Nothing in this labyrinth seemed to find him at a loss.
His whistling modulated plaintively as we passed a Negro chamber-
maid. And that was all.

In my attempt to walk faster, I had lost along these similar
corridors what little confidence I had left after my escape from
quarantine. I was crumbling to pieces, as I had seen my hut
crumble in the winds and warm rain of Africa. I was lost in a
tornado of unfamiliar sensations here. There comes a moment
between two civilizations when one finds oneself struggling in a
vacuum.

Suddenly, without warning, the bell-hop swung around. We had
arrived. I hurled myself through a door into my room, a large,
ebony-panelled box. Only on the table did a lamp cast a glimmer
of dim, greenish light. The manager of the Gay Calvin Hotel
wished to make known to visitors that he, the manager, took a
personal interest in their welfare and would at all times be ready
to make sure of their being continually in good spirits throughout
the length of their sojourn in New York. Reading this announcement,
which was put up where one couldn't miss it, added, if anything,
to my confusion.

As soon as I was alone, it was much worse. All this America
was nagging at me, asking me huge questions and filling me with
horrible presentiments, even here in this room.

For a start I tried nervously from the bed to get used to the
gloom of this little pen. With rumbling regularity the walls by my
window trembled at the passing of an elevated railroad car. It
hurtled along opposite between two streets, like a shell filled with
quaking, jumbled flesh, careering from one district to another
across this lunatic city. You could see it down there, rushing
over a network of steel girders whose echo groaned on long after
it had passed at a hundred miles an hour. Dinner time slipped by
during this prostration and bedtime too.

It was above all else this frantic railway which wore me down.
On the other side of my little mine shaft of a courtyard the house
wall opposite lit up first one, and two, then dozens of its rooms.
In some I could see what was going on. Families going to bed.
These Americans seem as weary as our own people, after hours
of standing up. The women had very pale, very full thighs, at
least, those I could see properly had. Most of the men shaved,
smoking a cigar, before going to bed.

Once in bed, they take off their spectacles first, and then remove
their dentures, which they put in a glass, and then place the whole
lot on show. Just as in the streets, the sexes don't seem to speak
to each other. You'd say they were fat, very docile animals, very
used to being bored. I saw in all only two lots do, with the light
on, at any rate, what I was waiting for, and not violently at all.
The other women just ate sweets in bed, while waiting for their
husbands to finish their toilet. And then they all put out the
light.

That's what's sad about people going to bed. You can easily
see that they just let things run their course, you can see that
they don't think to wonder why they're there at all. They don't
care. They sleep no matter what happens; insensitive dolts,
mere oysters. Americans or not, their consciences are always
easy.

But I, I'd seen too many awkward things to be easy in mine.
I knew too much and yet too little about it. "I must go out," I
said, "Out into the street again. Perhaps you will meet Robinson."
It was an idiotic idea, of course, but I only gave it to myself to
have an excuse for going out again, because, however much I
tossed and turned on my little cot, not the tiniest bit of sleep
could I snatch. Nothing that I could do brought me either comfort
or distraction.... And that is to sound the utmost depths of
depression.

What is worse is that one wonders how, to-morrow, one will find
strength enough to go on doing what one has been doing the day
before, and for so much too long before that,--strength for the
whole mad business, for a thousand and one vain projects: attempts
to escape crushing necessity; attempts which are always
stillborn; and all just to convince oneself once more that Destiny
is insurmountable, that one must fall back each evening to the
bottom of the wall, under the burden of next day, each time more
precarious and more sordid.

Perhaps too it is mostly Age, that traitor, who comes and threat-
ens us as well. There's not much music left in one that Life
can be made to dance to, that's what it is. All of one's youth has
gone now to the end of the world, in a silence of facts to die.
And where can one go, I ask you, when one is no longer suffici-
ently mad? Truth is a pain which will not stop. And the truth
of this world is to die. You must choose: either dying or lying.
Personally, I have never been able to kill myself.

The best thing then was to go out into the streets, a minor
suicide. Every one has their own little remedies, their own ways
of attaining sleep and food. I had to manage to get to sleep,
somehow, so as to have the strength again to-morrow to earn
myself a crust of bread. Energy had to be found, just enough
energy to get a job next day and meanwhile, now at once, to enter
the unknown of sleep. Don't imagine it's as easy as all that to
fall asleep once you have begun to disbelieve everything, mostly
because of all the times you have been frightened.

I dressed and somehow or other found myself at the elevator,
feeling rather gaga, however. I still had to cross the vestibule
past more rows of ravishing enigmas with such alluring legs,
and delicate, severe little faces. They were goddesses, of course,
kidnapping goddesses. One might have come to an understanding
with them. But I was afraid of being arrested. All too difficult.
Almost every desire a poor man has is a punishable offence. So
back I went into the street. It was no longer the same crowd as
before. These people strolling along the pavements showed a little
more spirit, as if they came from a less arid country, one of
diversion, an evening country.

The crowds rolled forward in the direction of sky signs high in
the darkness, like twisting multicoloured snakes. More people
flowed in from all the surrounding streets. "They're worth a good
many dollars," I thought, "a crowd like that, just for their
handkerchiefs alone, or their silk socks. Even for their cigarettes."
And just to think that you can be in the middle of all this money
yourself and it doesn't bring you in a penny more, even to go and
eat with! It's maddening to realize how completely men are walled
away from each other, like so many houses.

So I dragged myself along towards the lights: one movie palace,
then another next door, and yet another, and so on the whole
way. We lost a large section of the crowd in front of each. I
chose one of these movies for myself, where the photographs
outside showed women in undies--and, my, what thighs! Oh boy!
Heavy! Full! Perfectly shaped! And then such sweet little heads
on top, drawn, as though by contrast, so delicately, so daintily,
in such easy and unerring line, perfect, without a fault, without
a blemish anywhere,--perfect I tell you, fragile yet firm and
concise at the same time! Every daring loveliness that life could
lavish, a prodigal beauty, a rash extravagance of the most pro-
found, the most divine harmonies possible!

It was pleasant inside the movie house, warm and comfortable.
Immense organs, as gentle as those in a cathedral, but a warm
cathedral, as rich as thighs. Not a moment lost. You plunge
straight into an atmosphere of warm forgiveness. You only had
to let yourself go to feel that the world had at last become
indulgent. Already you almost did think that.

Then dreams waft upwards in the darkness to join the mirages
of silver light. They are not quite real, the things that happen
on the screen; they stay in some wide, troubled domain meant for
the poor, for dreams and for dead men. You have to hurry to
stuff yourself with these dreams, so as to get through the life
which is waiting for you outside, once you've left the theatre,
so as to last through a few more days of this strife with men and
things. You chose from among these dreams those that will warm
your heart the most. For me, I must admit, it was the dirty ones
that did. It's no good being proud, you've got to take from a
miracle whatever you can hold. A blonde with unforgettable neck
and nipples saw fit to break the silence of the screen with a
song about her loneliness. I could well have wept with her.
That is what's so good. What a fillip it gives you! There'd be
courage in my bones--I felt it there already--for two whole
days after that. I didn't even wait for the lights to go up in the
auditorium. I was ripe for all resolution to sleep, now that I had
absorbed some of this admirable psychological effervescence.
On returning to the Gay Calvin Hotel, although I saluted him,
the porter failed to wish me good night, as ours at home do. But
I wasn't worrying at present over any porter's misdemeanours. The
glow within me was enough in itself to soften the rebuffs of
twenty years. That's the way it is.

In my room, I had scarcely shut my eyes when the theatre
blonde came at once to sing again, for me alone, her sorrowing
song. I helped her, so to speak, to put me to sleep, and I succeeded
pretty well. ... I wasn't quite alone any more.... You can't
possibly sleep quite alone.





IF YOU WANT TO EAT CHEAPLY IN THE UNITED STATES, YOU CAN
GO and buy a little hot roll with a sausage inside; it's convenient,
they sell them at the corner of any little street and they're not at
all expensive. Eating in the poorer districts didn't worry me of
course, in the least, but never to meet those lovely creatures of the
rich, that was really terrible. Under those circumstances there
wasn't any point in eating at all.

At the Gay Calvin, on its thick carpets I could still pretend
to be looking for some one among those too exquisite women in the
entrance hall, and become hardened, bit by bit, to their equivocal
attitude. On thinking it over, I decided that the boys on the In-
fanta Conita had been right to bawl me out. I was discovering, by
experience, that I hadn't at all the right sort of tastes for an
under dog. All the same that didn't give me back my will power. I
went and took more and more doses of the movie, here, there and
everywhere, but it only just provided me with the energy for a little
walk or so. No more. In Africa I had indeed found a sufficiently
frightful kind of loneliness but the isolation of this American ant
heap was even more shattering.

I had always suspected myself of being almost purposeless, of
not really having any single serious reason for existing. Now I
was convinced, in the face of the facts themselves, of my personal
emptiness. In surroundings so much too different from those in
which I had previously had my meagre being, it was as if I had at
once fallen to pieces. I discovered that now that I no longer heard
mention of familiar things, there was nothing to prevent me from
slipping into an irresistible condition of boredom, a sort of sickly,
terrifying collapse of the mind. It was a disgusting experience.

When on the point of losing my last dollar in this venture, I
was still bored. So bored that I even refused to consider my most
urgent needs. We are, by nature, so futile that distraction alone
can prevent us from dying altogether. I clung to the movies with
a fervour born of despair.

Leaving the crazy gloom of my hotel, I again tried wandering
about a bit in the principal streets of the neighbourhood, an insipid
carnival of vertiginous buildings. My lassitude deepened before a
row of these elongated facades, this monotonous surfeit of streets,
bricks, and endless windows, and business and more business, this
chancre of promiscuous and pestilential advertising. A mass of
grimy, senseless lies.

Down by the river I came on other little streets, lots of them,
which were more ordinary in size; I mean, for instance, that here
all the windows of a single house opposite could have been broken
just from where I was standing on the pavement.

The smell of endless frying pervaded this quarter of the town.
The shops no longer had displays out, for fear things might be
stolen. Everything reminded me of my hospital at Villejuif, even
the little children with bulging bowlegs along the sidewalk, and
the hand-organs too. I could well have stayed there with them but
they, the poor, would not have fed me either, and I should have
seen them all the time and their too wretched state frightened me.
So I went back to the central part of the town. "You dirty dog,"
I said to myself, "You really have no goodness in you." You've
got to become resigned to knowing yourself a little better each
day, since you haven't the courage left to put a stop once and
for all to your own snivellings.

A car ran along by the Hudson, towards the centre of the town,
an ancient car shaking on every wheel and in all its pitiful body.
It took a good hour to cover the distance uptown. The passengers
submitted without impatience to a complicated ritual of paying
their fare by means of a kind of coffee grinder for money, which
there was at the entrance to the car. The conductor watched them
work this thing, dressed like one of ours in a sort of "Balkan
prisoner of war" uniform.

At last we arrived, exhausted, and after these proletarian ex-
cursions I again passed in front of that never-failing double row
of loveliness in my tantalizing hotel lounge; again and again I
went by, in a trance and filled with desire.

My penury was such that I didn't dare look in my pocket to
find out for certain. As long as Lola had not chosen this of all
times to be out of town! I thought. And anyway, would she be
willing to receive me? Had I better touch her for fifty or for a
hundred dollars to start with? I hesitated, I felt sure I shouldn't
have the necessary nerve until I had eaten and slept really well
for once. And then, if I succeeded in this initial enterprise, I would
redouble my efforts to find Robinson, that is, as soon as I felt
strong enough again. Robinson wasn't at all like me! Oh, no, not
Robinson. He, at any rate, was a man of guts. A real fine fellow!
He was certain to know already all the ins and outs, all the
tricks of the trade over here. Maybe too he had some way of laying
hold of this certainty, this peace of mind, which I so badly
needed....

If he too had come off a galley, as I imagined he must have,
and been up and around in these parts for some time before me,
he'd be certain to have settled himself into some job in America by
now. He wouldn't ever be bothered by the ceaseless racket of this
hurdy-gurdy. Perhaps if I'd thought it out clearly, I myself could
have gone and looked for a job in one of these offices whose dazz-
ling name plates I read outside.... But the thought of having
to go into one of those buildings startled me and enfeebled my
wits. My hotel was quite enough--that gigantic, odiously animated
tomb.

Was it possible that all this bulk of matter, all this hive of
offices, this endless crisscross of girders, didn't really have the
same effect on the inhabitants as it did on me? Maybe this mighty
torrent in suspense spelt security to them, whereas to me it was
nothing but a ghastly system of restraints and bricks and corridors,
Yale locks and guichets, a Gargantuan, inexplicable architectural
agony.

To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads
hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-belief.

With only three dollars to my name, I went to watch them
twinkle in the palm of my hand under the light signs in Times
Square, that astounding little open space where publicity flares
out over the heads of a mob engaged in choosing itself a movie
to go to. I was looking for a very cheap restaurant and found
one of these rationalised eating places where service is reduced to
a minimum and the business of feeding is simplified down to the
barest level of nature's needs. At the door a tray is put into your
hands and you queue up. You wait your turn. By my side extremely
nice-looking candidates for supper, like me, said nothing
at all. It would be pretty astonishing, I thought, to be able to
address oneself to one of these pert young ladies with a neat,
enchanting nose. "Mademoiselle," one would say, "I am rich,
very rich ... pray tell me what you would like for supper...."

Then everything would become simple at once, utterly, divinely
simple, everything which a moment before was so complicated.
The whole thing would change and a horribly hostile world would
roll to your feet, a sly, soft, silent, velvet ball. At the same
time too, maybe you'd lose that wearing habit of dreaming about
success and the happiness of wealth because now you could put
out your finger and touch all that.... The life of penniless people
is one long refusal of a long delirium, and actually one only
knows, one can only be delivered from, what oneself possesses.
For my part, so many dreams had I picked up and abandoned
that the wind whistled through my disgustingly tattered and
tumble-down conscience.

Meanwhile I dared not enter into the mildest of conversations
with these young things in the restaurant. I held onto my tray
in orderly silence. When my turn came to pass along in front of
the counter piled with delicatessen, I took everything that was
given to me. The place was so clean, so brightly lit, that you felt
you were being carried along on its polished surface like a fly on
milk.

The waitresses, looking like hospital nurses, stood behind the
nouilles, the rice and stewed fruits. Each had her own specialty.
I filled up from where the nicest of them stood. Alas, they didn't
smile at their customers at all. As soon as you had what you
wanted, you had to go quietly away and sit down, leaving room
for others. You walk delicately about, balancing your tray, as if
crossing an operating theatre. It was a great change from my little
ebony and gilt room at that Gay Calvin Hotel of mine.

But if they showered all this light on us customers, if for a
moment they lifted us from out of our accustomed darkness, it was
all part of a plan. There was some idea of the proprietor's behind
all this. I felt distrustful. It has a very weird effect on you after
days of shadow to be bathed all of a sudden in a flood of light.
Personally, it added a little extra craziness to everything for me.
Not that that required much doing.

I couldn't manage to hide my feet under the spotless little glass-
topped table I found myself sitting at; they spread out everywhere
all around. I could have wished them somewhere else for the moment,
those feet of mine, because from the other side of the shop window
we were in full view of rows of people whom we had left behind us
in the street. They were waiting till we had finished swallowing
our meal, so that they could come and take our places. In fact,
it was for this reason and so as to keep their appetites up, that
we were so flooded with light, and emphasized, as a piece of liv-
ing publicity. The strawberries on my gateau shimmered with so
many reflections that I couldn't bring myself to eat them.

There's no escaping American business method.

But in spite of everything, through all this glare and uneasiness,
I was aware of a delightful waitress coming and going in our
immediate vicinity, and decided not to miss a single one of her
charming movements.

When my turn came to have her take away my plate, I made a
careful note of the exceptional shape of her eyes, which were set
at a much sharper angle, upward and outwards, than those of
French women. The eyelids curled up too, very slightly, towards the
eyebrow by her temples. Cruelty in fact, but just the right amount
of it, a cruelty to be kissed, a sharp insidious quality like that
taste of Rhine wine which one somehow can't help rather liking.
When she came near me, I started to make little knowing signs
to her, as though I recognized her. She watched me entirely without
any pleasure, like an animal, but with some slight curiosity, all
the same. "Here," I said to myself, "is the first American woman
who hasn't been able to avoid looking at me."

When I'd eaten my sparkling pie there was nothing for it but
to give up my place to somebody else. Whereupon, dithering a
little, instead of making straight for the very obvious exit, I had
the audacity to ignore the man at the cash desk, who was waiting
for us all and our money, and steered towards my blonde, detaching
myself in a quite unheard-of way amid all those well-ordered
waves of light.

The twenty-five waitresses in a row at their posts behind the
food all signalled to me that I was going wrong, that I had made
a mistake. There was a great stir on the other side of the window
among the people waiting, and those about to begin hesitated to
sit down. I had broken the set order of things. Every one around
expressed their astonishment aloud. "Must be some foreigner,
surely," they said.

But I had my own idea, for what it was worth, and I wasn't
going to let the beauty who had served me slip through my
fingers. She had looked at me, the little darling; so much the
worse for her! I had had enough of being alone. No more nonsense.
Now for some sympathy, for real contact! "You know me
hardly at all, Mademoiselle, but I already love you; would you
like us to get married?" That's the way I spoke to her, the most
honest way possible.

Her reply never reached me, because a giant of a doorkeeper,
he too dressed all in white, came along at that moment and pushed
me outside, neatly, quietly, without being at all insulting or
rough, into the night, like a dog that's forgotten itself. It
was all quite all right and straightforward; I had nothing to
complain of.

So I went up back to the Gay Calvin.

In my room the same thunderings continued, in snatches, to
shatter their own echoes; first the roar of the Elevated, which
seemed to be hurling itself towards us from a very long way off,
and every time it passed to be taking all its supports with it to
wreck the city, and in between the incoherent hoots of vehicles
below, which came up from the streets, and then as well that soft
murmur of a moving crowd, always hesitant, always about to dis-
appear, and then hesitating again and coming back. The bubbling,
like jam, of people in a city.

From where I was up there, you could perfectly well shout out
over their heads whatever you pleased. I tried it. They disgusted
me, the whole mass of them. I hadn't the guts to tell them so to
their faces during the daytime, but where I was I ran no risks.
I called to them "'Help! Help!" just to see if they'd take any
notice. None whatever. They were pushing life and the night and
the daytime before them; life hides everything from them. In the
midst of their own noise they hear nothing. They don't give a
damn. And the bigger the town and the higher the town, the less
they bloody well care. I'm telling you. I've tried. And it's no use.





IT WAS ONLY FOR FINANCIAL REASONS, BUT EXTREMELY URGENT
and pressing ones, that I began to try and find Lola. Had it not
been for my piteous need of money, I should certainly have let
her grow old and disappear without ever seeing my little minx of
a friend again. Whatever one may say, she had treated me--and
there appeared to be no doubt about that when I thought back
on it--in the most scurvy and deplorable fashion.

The selfishness of people with whom one has come into contact
in life, when one remembers them in later years, is apparent
for what it was--hard as metal, hard as platinum, and far more
durable than Time itself.

When one is still young, one manages to excuse the stoniest
indifferences, the most bare-faced impositions, making allowances
for them on grounds of personal idiosyncrasy and God knows
what sort of callow romanticism. But later on, when life has
taught you how much caution, cruelty and malice are required
of you, if only you are to live through it reasonably well at a
normal temperature, you realize, you're in a position to understand
the dirty deals a past contains. All that you need to do, and what
you always need, is to take a very careful look into your own
heart and see what you yourself have sunk to. There's no mystery,
no nonsense left; you've had to swallow all the poetry you ever
had, since you've survived till then. Life's become a lot of pork
and beans.

I found my nasty little friend eventually, after a lot of trouble,
on a twenty-third floor in Seventy-seventh Street. It's incredible,
when one's going to ask a favour of people, how unpleasant they
seem. She had a comfortable little place, very much the sort of
thing I had expected.

Having stuffed myself beforehand with large doses of Hollywood,
I was pretty well mentally in readiness, and just about emerg-
ing from the state of coma I had been in since my arrival
in New York; our first meeting was less unpleasant than I had
imagined it would be. Lola didn't seem very surprised to see
me, only somewhat displeased when she recognized me.

I embarked by way of a start on an anodyne conversation about
various topics of our common past--keeping it all on as prudent
a footing as possible and mentioning the war along with other
things, not stressing it too much, just incidentally. There I
dropped quite a bad brick. Lola wouldn't have a word said about
the war, not at any price. It made her feel old. She was annoyed
and retaliated at once by admitting that she would not have recog-
nized me on the street, age had already so wrinkled, thickened,
caricatured me. There we were, busily exchanging compliments.
The little slut, did she think she could get my goat with that
sort of flapdoodle? I didn't even deign to take up these cheap
gibes.

Her taste in furnishing wasn't anything much out of the ordinary
but the room was pretty nice all the same--anyway, it seemed
all right to me after my Gay Calvin Hotel.

The way a quickly made fortune comes, the details of it, always
gives one an impression of magic. After the "arrival" of
Musyne and Mademoiselle Herote, I knew that sex is the poor
person's pocket gold mine. This feminine pettishness on Lola's
part delighted me, and I would certainly have given my last
dollar to her concierge just to start her talking.

But there wasn't a concierge in her house. There wasn't a
concierge in the whole of New York. A city devoid of concierges
can't have any life, any atmosphere; it's as dull as a soup without
salt or pepper, a wretched thin brew. Oh, those choice morsels!
Titbits gathered in boudoirs, kitchens and attics, dripping,
cascading downstairs to the concierge, who sits there in the midst
of life,--what a rich infernal harvest! Some of our concierges at
home succumb at their posts; laconic, coughing, adorable, bewild-
ered, they are consumed and stupefied by so much truth, like
martyrs to it.

One must admit it's a duty to try everything against the abomina-
tion of being poor--one should get tight on anything one can, on
the cheapest wine, the movie, anything. One shouldn't be difficult,
"particular," as they say in America. Our own concierges provide
year in and year out for those who know how to take it and what
to do with it, cherishing it in their hearts--hate enough and
to spare and for nothing, enough to smash the world. In New York
one is dreadfully lost without this vital seasoning, this mean but
genuine, all-important condiment, lacking which the spirit lan-
guishes and is reduced to merely vague malignings and a babble of
pale slanders. Without a concierge, you don't get anything that
bites, harms, cuts, maddens or obsesses and adds something positive
to the general stock of hate in the world, illuminating it with
a thousand vivid details.

A loss which was all the more to be regretted, since Lola, seen
in her own surroundings, was making me experience quite a new
sensation of disgust. I longed to spew out my horror at her absurdly
petty smugness and success--but to whom was I to turn?
The effect was instantly contagious and Musyne's memory at
once became hostile and repugnant for me too. A lively hatred for
the two women was born in me; it's with me still, it has become
an essential part of my make-up. A whole lot of corroborative
details was what I needed to be delivered in time and forever
from any present or future feeling of indulgence towards Lola.
One can't relive one's life. Forgiveness is not what's difficult;
one's always too ready to forgive. And it does no good, that's
obvious.

But let me get on with my story: Lola was wandering about her
room without much on, and her body struck me after all as still
really very desirable. A well-cared-for body always suggests the
possibility of theft, of a lovely, direct, intimate intrusion into
the reality of wealth and luxury, without the fear of punishment.

Perhaps she was only waiting for a move from me to turn me out.
Actually it was mostly this damned momentary lecherous impulse
which made me careful. Food first. And anyway, she went on tell-
ing me all about the trivialities of her daily life. The world
would surely have to be shut down for two or three generations
at least, if there were no lies left to tell people. There'd
be nothing to say to one another--or very little. Eventually she
asked me what I thought of this America of hers. I confessed
that I had reached that stage of misery and weakness where any-
body and anything fills you with fear, and that her country terrified
me quite definitely more than the whole sum total of threats,
actual, hidden and unforeseen which I found it contained, partic-
ularly on account of the vast indifferences towards me which, as
far as I was concerned, was what it stood for.

I had got to earn a daily crust, I told her, and so would have
to get over all these foolish fears as soon as possible. I was
already pretty far behindhand in this respect, and I assured her
I would be extremely grateful if she would be kind enough to give
me an introduction to some possible employer ... some friend or
relation of hers.... And at her very earliest convenience. A
very small salary was all I wanted.... And a lot more pretty
nonsense I spun at her.... She didn't take to this humble yet
indiscreet petition at all well. Her manner was discouraging from
the outset. She said she knew absolutely nobody who could give
me a job or any sort of help. We were forced to come back to life
in general and her existence in particular.

We were still sizing each other up morally and physically like
this, when the bell rang. Whereupon, without pause or interval
of any sort, four women came into the room: four painted, middle-
aged females, well covered with muscles and jewellery, who
greeted Lola effusively. I was very summarily introduced and
Lola, who was clearly annoyed at their arrival, tried to lead them
off somewhere else; but they obstinately took no notice and all
together turned on me to tell me all they knew about Europe.
An old-world garden apparently, full of antiquated, erotic, greedy
madmen. They knew their Chabanais and Invalides by heart.

Personally, I'd never visited either of these places, the first
being too expensive, the second too far away. But I was filled
by an answering gust of automatic, weary patriotism, absurder
than one usually feels on such occasions. I retorted with some
heat that their town got on my nerves. A sort of wretched general
store, I told them, damnably bad yet destined, one supposed, to
be obstinately made to succeed....

While I talked away artificially and conventionally like this,
I couldn't help seeing other reasons besides malaria for my present
state of mental and physical prostration. It was a question as well
of a change of habits. I would have once more to learn to recognize
new faces in new surroundings, other ways of talking and of lying.
One's laziness is almost as strong as life itself. Then fatuity
of this fresh farce you've got to play gets you down; you need,
when all is said and done, more cowardice than courage to begin
all over again. That's what moving about, travelling, is; it's
this inexorable glimpse of existence as it really is during those
few lucid hours, so exceptional in the span of human time, when
you are leaving the customs of the last country behind you
and the other new ones have not yet got their hold on you.

Everything at such moments adds to your wretched insufficiency,
forcing you in your weakness to see things, people and the
future as they are--that is to say as skeletons, nothing but
ciphers, which nevertheless you will have to love, cherish,
defend and encourage, as if they really existed.

A new country, other people around one behaving rather oddly,
a few little vanities gone, some conceit or other now without its
raison d'etre, its lie, its familiar echo, and that is all that's
needed; your head spins, doubt takes hold of you, the infinite opens
for you in particular; a ridiculous little infinite it is, and you
tumble into it.

Travel is the search for this nothing at all, this little moment of
giddiness for fools....

Lola's four friends were extremely amused to hear me making my
flamboyant confession like this, quite the little Jean-Jacques,
in front of her. They called me a number of names which I barely
understood with their extraordinary accent, the unctuous and
indecent way Americans have of speaking.

When the black servant brought in the tea things, there was
silence. But one of these callers must have been more observant
than the rest, for she announced in a loud voice that I was shiv-
ering with fever and must surely have a frightful thirst. What we
had in the way of tea absolutely delighted me, in spite of feeling
so shaky. Admittedly those sandwiches saved my life.

There followed a conversation about the comparative merits of
the more spectacular Parisian brothels, but I didn't take the
trouble to join in it. The pretty ladies next sampled a good number
of complicated drinks, and under their warming, confidential
influence got very excited on the subject of "marriage." Although
I was pretty much overcome by our repast, I couldn't help noticing
en passant that they were talking about some very special
kind of marriage, apparently the mating of very young couples,
of mere children, which somehow brought them in a commission.
Lola noticed that the conversation was rousing my keenest
curiosity and attention. She stared at me very hard and stopped
drinking. The men Lola knew, her American men, were never
guilty like me of inquisitiveness. With some difficulty I behaved
myself under her scrutiny. I would have loved to ask these
women a whole lot of questions.

Finally our guests took their leave, moving heavily, exalted by
alcohol and erotically enlivened. They squirmed as they talked
with a curiously elegant and cynical sexuality. I caught a glimpse
in all this of some Elizabethan thing which I myself should also
have liked to feel, concentrated and deliciously vibrating, in its
proper place.

But to my great grief and regret, I never got more than just
this inkling of this particular biological communion, a vital
exchange, which when one is travelling is an experience of such
decisive importance. Sad, sad thought.

Lola, when her friends had gone, was frankly furious. The
whole incident had caused her very great annoyance. I didn't
say a word.

"What hags!" she exclaimed, a few minutes later.

"How did you get to know them?" I asked.

"They're old friends...."

For the time being she was in no mood for further confidences.
Judging by their rather arrogant way of treating her, it had
struck me that these women had a hold over Lola in certain circles
--probably some definite power over her. I was never to know
more.

Lola spoke of going downtown, but suggested that I stay there
at her place and wait for her, eating something if I felt like
it. Having left the Gay Calvin without paying my bill and, for
excellent reasons, not intending to go back there, I was very
grateful to her for this permission--a few more moments of warmth
before going off to face the street again--and, my godfathers,
what a street!

As soon as I was alone, I went along a passage towards the
place I'd seen the Negro emerge from. I met him halfway there
and shook him by the hand. He accepted me at once and took
me along to his pantry, a fine orderly place, much more logical
and pretty than the drawing-room.

Right away he began to spit on the magnificent tiled floor in
front of me--spitting as only Negroes can spit: a long way, a
lot and to perfection. I spat too, out of politeness, as well as
I could. Thereafter he took me into his confidence. Lola, I learnt
from him, had a speed boat on the river, two cars in the garage,
and a cellar full of bottles from every country in the world.
Catalogues were sent to her from the smartest Paris shops. There
it was. And he began to outline this same summary information
over and over again. I stopped listening to him.

As I slumbered beside him, the past came before my eyes--
Lola leaving me in Paris during the war--being hunted, tracked
down, ambushed, the harangues, the lies, the general craftiness;
Musyne, the Argentines, their ships full of frozen meat. Topo.
The crowds of scum on the Place Clichy; Robinson, sea waves,
poverty, Lola's glistening white kitchen, her black servant, and
me inside it all like any one else might have been. Everything
would go on just the same. The war had burnt up some and
warmed others, as a fire can torture or comfort, according to
whether one is standing in it or in front of it. You have to
look out for yourself, that's all there is to it.

It was true too, what she'd said about my having changed. Life
twists you and crushes your face. It had crushed hers too, but not
so much, nothing like so much. The poor fade. Poverty is a giant
who uses your features like a piece of cotton waste to wipe a filthy
world. And still there's some left over.

All the same, I thought I noticed a change in Lola, moments of
depression and sadness, gaps in her hopeful stupidity, those mo-
ments in which a human being needs to gather strength to carry
a little further the acquisitions of his passing life; but they're
too heavy now, do what he will, for what energy he still has left,
for his dirty little remaining sense of poetry.

Her black man suddenly began to skip about. Something had start-
ed him off again. As his new-found friend, he insisted on stuffing
me with cakes, loading me with cigars. He ended up by producing
from a drawer, with infinite precautions, a round leaden mass.

"My bomb!" he angrily announced. I jumped back. "Liberta!
Liberta!" he screeched delightedly.

He put it back in its place and spat again, superbly. What an
ecstasy of emotion! He was terribly excited. His laughter infected
me, that colic sensation of merriment. One gesture more or less,
I told myself, what does it matter? When Lola at last returned,
she found us together in the drawing-room, smoking and laughing
hard. She pretended not to notice.

The Negro quickly disappeared; she took me back to her room.
She seemed sad, she looked pale and tired. Where could she have
been? It was beginning to be quite late. It was the hour when
Americans are lost because around them life has begun to beat
to a slower rhythm. One car out of every two is back in its
garage. It's the moment for half confidences--but you've got to
hustle if you're going to avail yourself of it. She led up to it
with questions, but her tone of voice when she asked me about
the life I'd been living in Europe irritated me considerably.

She made no bones about considering me capable of any sort of
caddishness. She realized quite clearly that I'd come to see her
to ask for money and that in itself set up a very natural sense
of strain between us. Such feelings verge on murder. We stuck
to trivialities and I did my utmost to avoid a definite misunder-
standing. Among other things, she inquired after my genital lapses
and wanted to know if I hadn't somewhere on my wanderings produc-
ed some little child she could adopt. It was a curious notion
of hers. The idea of adopting a child was an obsession with
her. She believed rather simply that a scamp like me must have
founded secret dynasties more or less everywhere under the sun.
She was rich, she told me, and ached to be able to devote herself
to a little child. She had read all the books about care of the
child, especially the ones which go all lyrical about motherhood--
books which, if you thoroughly steep yourself in them, rid you
absolutely of any wish ever to copulate again. Every virtue has
its own indecent literature.

As what she wanted was to sacrifice herself entirely to some
"little being", I myself was out of luck. I had nothing to offer
her but my own large person, which she found utterly repulsive.
Only prettily presented poverties are any good in fact, poverty
imaginatively dished up. Our conversation languished.... "Listen,
Ferdinand," she suggested at last. "We've talked enough; I'll
take you over to the other side of New York to see my little
protege--I like looking after him but his mother irritates
me...."It was an odd time to choose. On the way there in the
car we talked about her amazing, fire-eating Negro.

"Did he show you his bombs?" she asked. I admitted that I had
been subjected to that ordeal.

"The lunatic's not really dangerous actually, Ferdinand. He
fills his bombs with my old bills.... There was a time long ago
in Chicago when he belonged to a very powerful secret society
for the emancipation of the blacks.... They were frightful
people, apparently. The police broke it up but my Negro has had
a taste for bombs ever since. ... He never puts any gunpowder
in them. The idea of the thing's enough.... It's really only his
artistic temperament.... He'll always be plotting revolutions.
But I keep him on, he's such an excellent servant. And taken all
in all, perhaps he's more honest than other people who don't plot
revolutions...."

And she came back to her adoption mania.

"Really, it's a pity, Ferdinand, that you haven't a little girl
somewhere.... Your dreamy temperament would go very well in a
woman, whereas it doesn't seem at all fitting in a man...."

The rain streamed down, closing the night around Lola's car
as we slid along on smooth strips of asphalt. Everything was cold
and hostile to me, even her hand which I was holding very tight
in mine all the time. We were completely apart from each other.
We came to a house which from the outside looked very different
from the one we'd just left. In an apartment on the first floor
a little boy about ten years old and his mother were waiting for
us. The furniture in the flat aped Louis XV and you could smell
the remains of a recent meal. The little boy came and sat on
Lola's knee and kissed her very prettily. The mother also seemed
to me to be very sweet to Lola, and while Lola was talking to the
child, I managed to take the mother into a near-by room.

When we returned, the kid was practicing for Lola's benefit a
dance step which he'd just been taught at school. "He'll have to
have a few more private lessons," said Lola, "and then perhaps
I could introduce him to my friend Vera at the Globe. There may
be quite a future for the child." His mother at these kind and
encouraging words burst into gratitude and tears. She was given
a little roll of green dollars which she popped into her bosom
like a billet-doux.

"I'd quite like that kid," Lola remarked, when once we'd left
the house. "But I have to support his mother too and I don't
like mothers who are as sharp as all that.... And the kid's too
vicious, anyway. ... It's not the sort of attachment I really
want.... I'd like to have entirely maternal feelings. Do you
understand, Ferdinand?" Where food's concerned I can under-
stand anything anybody wants me to: it's not brains any longer,
it's a piece of elastic.

She would go on about her desire for purity. A few streets
farther on she asked me where I was going to sleep that night and
walked along with me a few yards. I answered that if I couldn't
lay my hands on a few dollars right away, I shouldn't be sleeping
anywhere.

"All right," she said, "come back with me and I'll give you some
money at home and then you can go wherever you like."

She was all for shooting me out into the night at the earliest
possible moment. Of course; it was the usual thing. If you go
on being pushed out like that into the night, you end up somewhere,
I supposed, all the same. That's the consolation. "Cheer up,
Ferdinand," I told myself several times just to keep going.
"Through being thrown out of every place, you'll surely finish
up by finding out what it is that frightens all these bloody people
so, and it's probably somewhere at the farther end of the night.
... That must be why they don't go into the depths of the night
themselves!"

After that, it was quite cold between us two in the car. The
streets we went along seemed to threaten us with all their silent
stones, armed and towering above us, a sort of suspended downpour.
A watching town, a monster bituminous and rain-sodden, ready
to pounce. At last we drew up. Lola went in before me.

"Come up," she said. "Follow me."

Her room again. I wondered how much she was going to give
me to have done and be rid of me. She was looking for dollar
bills in a little handbag on the table. I heard the tremendous
rustling of scrunched notes. What moments of excitement! There
was no other sound but this in all New York. But I was still so
worried that I asked, I don't know why, quite unsuitably, after
her mother, whom I'd forgotten.

"My mother's ill," she said, turning around and looking at me
straight in the face.

"Where is she at the moment?"

"In Chicago."

"What's the matter with her?"

"Cancer of the liver....I've put her in the hands of the best
specialists in the place.... Her treatment is costing me a lot
of money, but it'll save her life. They've told me so...."

She rushed on to tell me a lot more details of her mother's con-
dition in Chicago. Having suddenly become all friendly and
solicitous, she couldn't prevent herself appealing to me for some
intimate comfort. Now I'd got her.

"What d'you think, Ferdinand; don't you think they can cure
her?"

"No," I answered, very deliberately and firmly. "Cancers of the
liver are absolutely incurable."

She went as white as a sheet. It was certainly the first time
I'd seen the little bitch disconcerted by something.

"But after all, Ferdinand, the specialists assure me that she'll
get well! They guarantee it. They've written and told me so....
You know, they're very wonderful doctors, Ferdinand...

"For a fee, Lola, there will fortunately always be very wonderful
doctors. ... I'd do the same for you myself, if I were in their
place.... And you too, Lola, you'd do the same...

What I was saying struck her abruptly as so obvious, so undeniable,
that she couldn't get away from it.

Just for once in her life, for the first time in her life maybe,
her impudence was going to fail her.

"Oh, but listen, Ferdinand, you're hurting me horribly, can't
you see? I'm very fond of my mother; don't you know how fond
of her I am?"

That was a smart remark! God in Heaven! What the hell does
the world in general care whether you love your mother or not?
Sobbing in an emptiness all of her own. Dear little Lola!

"Ferdinand, you're an absolutely loathsome cad!" she went on in
a rage. "You're an unspeakable brute....You revenge yourself
for the beastly position you're in as shamelessly as you can, by
coming here and saying frightful things to me.... Why, I'm
sure you're actually doing Mother a lot of harm by talking like
that!"

There were tag ends of the Coue method trailing about in her
despair.

Her savage temper didn't frighten me half as much as that of
the officers on board the Admiral Bragueton, who had intended to
slaughter me for the titivation of a few bored lady passengers.
I watched Lola closely all the time she was calling me every
name under the sun, and I felt a certain pride as I realized that
the more she cursed me the greater grew my indifference--no,
what am I saying--my joy. One's really quite all right inside.
"She'll have to give me at least twenty dollars to be rid of me
now," I calculated. "Perhaps even more."

I took the offensive. "Lola, please lend me the money you pro-
mised me, or I shall be staying the night here, and you'll have me
going on and on telling you all I know about cancer and its
complications and its hereditariness--because, you know, cancer
is hereditary, Lola, don't forget."

As I proceeded to pick out, to toy with details of her mother's
case, I saw her blench, weaken, give way before my eyes. "Ah,
the slut," I said to myself, "hold on to her tight, Ferdinand!
Just once you've got her where you want her.... Don't let her go.
You won't get another chance like this for a long time!"
"There you are, take it!" she screamed, quite beside herself.
"Here are your hundred dollars, and now get out of here and
never come back, d' you hear me--never! Get out! Out! Out!
You dirty beast!"

"Give me a little kiss, though, Lola; don't let's quarrel," I sug-
gested, just to see how far I could go. Then she got a revolver
out of a drawer--and she meant it. The stairs were good enough
for me; I didn't wait for the elevator.

Still, this slap-up scene gave me back a taste for work and
bucked me up no end. Next day I boarded a train for Detroit,
where I'd heard it was easy to get taken on at a lot of little jobs
that weren't too hard and were well paid.




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