L'aube fraternelle

ALL SAINTS’ CAHIER OF THE FOURTH SERIES

CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE appearing twenty times a year PARIS 8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor

We place this cahier in the trade; we sell it for one franc.

The Fraternal Dawn

Sir,

I am sending you some papers that I have every reason to believe are of considerable interest. This is the journal of a young conscript exempted under Article 23. Here is how it came into my hands:

Two months ago, a soldier of the 33rd fortress artillery battalion was brought into my ward at the military hospital of X. During maneuvers in the mountains, in rather harsh weather, he had contracted pneumonia, which, in a constitution weakened by intellectual overwork and already undermined by unfortunate hereditary traits, soon turned into galloping consumption.

I should tell you that in hospitals, our attitude as doctors is quite different from the deliberate hauteur of the regimental surgeons. While making allowances for individual temperaments and particular moods, one must acknowledge that, since we do not have to face the demands of discipline and thwart the subterfuges of malingerers, we like to relax our brusqueness, and some of us, myself included, chat readily with our patients.

Mine interested me at once.

He was a tall fellow, thin, with rough features, but whose rugged physiognomy was lit by a deep gaze. There was so much intelligent gentleness in his face, thinned by illness, his blue eyes shone with so faint and pale a light, that I went toward him drawn by a sudden impulse of sympathy.

I was pleased to learn that he was a student at one of our great faculties. A graduate in letters, he was preparing for the agrégation when the year of military service came to interrupt his studies. I myself had brought back from my time at the Val-de-Grâce a keen taste for scientific methods and things of the mind. This was a bond between us. I lent him newspapers and journals.

He had no family left; his parents had died when he was at school; all that remained to him was an old uncle in the south, an indifferent and mediocre bachelor, owner of vineyards and a great hunter, with whom he had not two ideas in common.

He harbored no illusions about his case. I will not tell you that he awaited death with the serenity of the ancient sages, discussing with me the immortality of the soul. He was too simple to wish to raise himself to that stoicism.

The first moments when he clearly saw the approaching annihilation were painful and even terrible. He was seized with a great shudder at the thought of total destruction, and his thin hands clutched at things with a fierce energy and gestures of revolt. The hardest moments were those when he was carried in a wicker armchair into a long glass gallery that surrounds the first floor of the building.

They were bright September days; the mountains on the horizon were blue, the autumn light poured gently over the trees in blonde clarities, and the vines were tinged with purple. In the courtyard, patients in long gray frock-coats, wearing white cotton nightcaps, walked without a sound. There was such soft warmth in the air, in the sun, on the earth and on the waters, that he was frightened by it all, and an immense despair passed across his glassy eyes.

Then even this subsided. As the illness undermined him more deeply, the forces of resistance wore out, and with them the torment of regret. He died without convulsions, without agony, in a half-sleep, unconscious and light. His neighbors did not even notice. One morning, the sister who was shaking him to wake him found that he was dead. Life had detached itself in a breath, falling into nothingness in a slow and silent descent, like those gossamer threads he had watched swaying at length in the warm daylight, in the last moments of his solitary rest in the long glass gallery.

I found among his effects in his kit, along with a few textbooks annotated for exam preparation, this thin notebook covered in yellow canvas that I am sending you. It is nothing less than an autobiography in these few pages.

Worn by life, this little notebook is worn too. The pages, covered in fine handwriting, are sometimes in tatters and coming loose. You will notice that the cover is soiled by a rather long stay the soldier X. made at the camp of Eaubonne. It rained a great deal that year; as they were housed under tents, their effects placed on the ground at the head of their pallets, where the tent canvas hooks onto the pegs, were soaked by the downpour. The little notebook must have received its share of heaven’s waters and spent a rather long time in puddles, judging by its faded canvas and all the pages where the ink has dissolved. It is one more mark of sincerity, among so many others.

Second-class military doctor

THE ARRIVAL

So it is done. I have crossed the threshold of the barracks.

Here I am, casting glances around me, scrutinizing men and things to divine their intentions, benevolent or hostile.

The first impression is not cheerful. I am in a large room under the rafters, divided by the partition of the bunk-bed that reaches up to the ceiling beams. A long row of beds with brown blankets pulled tight, squared at the foot, over the iron frames of the cots. On the shelf, the men’s effects are wrapped in handkerchiefs of bright colors, printed with cannons and weapons. No furniture other than a table, a tin jug, a mirror fastened to the wall with screws. It is cold and full of order, it recalls prison or the monastic cell, immensely enlarged.

On placards, the quartermaster’s handwriting twists its complicated flourishes, the learned arabesques of the bastard script.

The windows are dormer windows. I approach.

The distant mountains profile themselves in the cold November air. Halfway up the slope, the stripped vines reveal the white soil, already washed by the first autumn rains. The stakes heaped there make black patches arranged in symmetrical rows. In the thin branches of the nearer poplars, tangled masses of twigs stand out — the nests of crows and magpies that are invisible in summer among the leaves.

Toward the west, so close to me that I almost think I could touch it at arm’s length, a Gothic cathedral, its pointed arches hollowed out, springs into the air, light and fine, with its deeply carved, chiseled architecture through which the light pours in floods, amid a wheeling flock of jackdaws and crows. So near, it will be precious to me; it will haunt my imagination with its monks of old, its plainsong, the sonorities of the organ; it will amuse my eyes with its morning splendors, its soaring into the blue air, with its black and confused mass, its boldly simplified outline, in romantic evenings.

At its foot, in the damp shade of the flying buttresses, a small public garden, beneath rows of linden trees, exhales a fragrance of ennui.

There are about twenty of us newcomers in the room. Smocks, jackets, woolen vests, otter-skin caps, and light bowler hats; and on the floor, in a curious unpacking, valises of every color and size; an Auvergnat even walks about with a heavy step, carrying under his arm a white wooden crate where he has packed his clothes and provisions for the journey. All are stupid, sullen, bewildered.

As soon as I turn my back, I sense behind me a stir of curiosity. They are trying to figure me out; I am different, with my white hands, my more carefully tended clothing. Schoolmaster, clerk, or seminarian? An ironic curiosity rises in my wake.

Here is my bed, my place on the shelf, my hooks in the bunk-bed, facing the narrow window. Two square meters where my life will fit for long months.

Already my veteran has taken charge of me. He is a locksmith, with a frank, energetic face. I think we will get along well together. When he learned I was a student, a knowing smile creased his lips: “So, a year to do. It’ll pass, go on, my greenhorn!”

Evening falls. The low black sky suddenly breaks, rain lashes the windows, and the gale whistles through the long corridors.

My heart drowns in floods of an immense sadness, fine, gray, bitter as ash. All sorts of terrors haunt me, the terror of tomorrows, at this turning point of my life, the physical fear of the fading light in this dreary, bare room where nothing is familiar. There are certain twilights whose shudder will be forever engraved in our failing flesh, whose memory will always return with an aftertaste of bitterness. It seems that all the evil powers brush against you on such evenings.

My throat is too tight to eat, and I go to bed as soon as the lamp is lit.

My veteran has raised the boards of the cot, set them boat-fashion so I won’t fall out during the night. He bends over me: “Here, take this scarf, the nights are cool up under the rafters. Put it round your neck.” It is said in a rough and clumsy voice, but it goes straight to my heart. In the ocean of despair where I am sinking, it is a strand of affection to which I cling. I thank him awkwardly, but I have the very clear sense that he understands me, and that my words say more than they express.

Footsteps sound on the floor. People come and go, then calm descends in the room where breathing rises. The bed is narrow and hard; I am afraid to stir, to slip. I float in a half-sleep from which sudden starts jerk me, making in my consciousness brutal and rapid awakenings. I struggle against the past that returns in fragments of dreams; visions whirl, brilliant or faded, disconnected phrases: the fair, fine face of one of my professors beneath his gold pince-nez, in a glass corridor, the casts of the Aegina marbles, the great quays, woods, stretches of river with its shimmering sun-bright ripples; the pointed gables of the little town.

All at once, a bugle call in the barracks courtyard wakes me completely. I listen, heart pounding.

I have recognized the broad rhythm, the drowsy fall of the final note. It is the lights-out that rises, swells by moments in the gale.

It is not what I had imagined, the broad song of peace falling, before the campfire flames, on valiant breasts open to the winds — it is not the soldier’s Angelus. It seems to me that we are carried away on some monstrous vessel, driven by black gusts, into terror, and that the great seabirds hurl their raucous cries into the wind and brush with their immense wings, opened in the night, the flanks of the ship.

After all, this life is not so different from my past life, at least in terms of comfort and luxury. The barracks room with its coaltar-coated floor is hardly more modest than my student lodgings, with their red tiles and rushmat.

But if the exterior was poor, with what jealous care I adorned my inner life, heightening it with artistic sensations.

Do you remember, O my distant friend, that courtyard of the museum where, under the plane trees and eucalyptus, we took a delicate pleasure in rereading Sophocles? Do you remember the Florentine bronze, the gracile Hermes, whose fine limbs mingled with the foliage of a weeping willow, and the sarcophagus transformed into a fountain, whose water fell into a basin, among irises and gladioli. The sounds of the outside world died on the threshold, and Antigone’s farewell to the light of the sun was not profaned by the murmurs of the street. Under the arcaded promenade, funerary monuments piously repeated the same inscription: Diis manibus! We walked in the ashes of the dead!

Those were the galleries where we would go to admire the sumptuous fabric of a brocade in a painting by Veronese, the terrifying rigidity of a corpse in a canvas by Zurbarán, or else the immense fresco that unrolled upon the blue sea of Sicily the white procession of horsemen, and the thin limbs of a young shepherd playing the syrinx among his goats.

When night came, we would go along the quays, beside the black water rolling silver and gold. We loved the same poets, whom we read in young Reviews of nuanced colors, rich only in hope. We sought out subtle rhythms and bizarrely sumptuous words. Poetry was a precious essence sold only in crystal flasks cut with facets. Other times, we put ingenuous tenderness, adolescent sensuality into the rudimentary syntax of Verlaine.

We despised the present, life, whose bitter beauty we did not understand. “Not color! oh nothing but nuance!” In the working-class districts, the tick-tock of looms sounded, and workers came out of the factory, gaunt and black.

Now, it appears to me that this pride was narrow and naive. We willfully ignored many things. Today, when I turn my gaze backward from the harsh reality where I live, the past appears petty, and all its fine nuances have faded and tarnished in the imperious, icy breath of the present. So much the better. The ocean waves beat against the ivory tower. And who could distinguish the song of rhythmic prose in the great sonorous clamor that rises from the bosom of the sea — the sea where pass the sails of those who labor and suffer!

A curious jumble, the barracks room.

All classes of society are represented; there are office clerks and factory workers, plowmen and bourgeois. Some have come in smocks, others in clogs, still others in fitted jackets and elegant cravats. But all are equal, all speak the same joyous language, chastely and naively obscene; all look alike in uniform, and nothing betrays, after a few weeks, the diversity of origin.

At the end of the room, against the tall window, are quartered the miners from the North. They are giants with fair hair, white flesh, skin bleached by working in the dark underground. With their hoarse voices, they move their limbs slowly, sit at the canteen before liters of spirits that they drink in long reveries. On Sunday nights, when they return from their benders, they terrify the “greenhorns” with their threats, and in the heavy darkness there is a noise of scuffles, overturned cots, boards flying. When cool-headed, they are patient and gentle, slow and apathetic.

Peasants are not lacking. Clumsy, having trouble lifting their soles, where the clod of native soil always weighs; small details reveal them: a horn knife attached to the belt by a leather strap, a watch chain adorned with rough pendants, a bladder tobacco pouch where they keep the coarse canteen tobacco they smoke in heavy, juicy wooden pipes. They are timid, hardworking, thrifty, docile, never shrinking from the task, the chores, the heavy loads to carry; they panic at drill at the thought of the nomenclatures they must spell out, open enormous round eyes, produce blunders in response to questions and laugh at them stupidly first. Some have an instinctive, unreflecting loyalty and goodness, with the docility and gentleness of a beast of burden, a good horse that doesn’t kick. Very proud of their home regions, there are incessant quarrels over the superiority of their terroirs. The mountain folk mock those of the plain, who answer back and reproach them for their deserts planted with pines. The “lard eaters” abuse the “river gudgeons.” They have amusing retorts, with an inventive picturesqueness, as produced by the rivalries of races, stung to the quick, where the wit of generations has been honed: “Where you’re from, they harvest grapes with poles,” says one. The other replies: “Shut up, where you’re from the rats come down from the attic to the cellar with tears in their eyes.”

Among these blooming heavyweights pass the thin, supple silhouettes of Parisian workers; sly, curiously chiseled faces, cigarette between their lips, who cock their képis and give them a rakish look. Lean and lithe, resilient as cats, they don’t feel fatigue, full of irony and disdain for the peasants, the “cabbage plants,” as they say. It is thanks to them that barrack slang is adorned with suburban words, argot terms borrowed from the language of butcher boys and hawkers: they whisper “vingt-deux” in the ranks when the adjutant’s profile appears; the words “perle,” “liquette,” “lingue” are in common use to denote tobacco, a shirt, a knife.

Nothing is funnier than to see a lout from the mountains, a lumberjack or clog-maker, in the course of an altercation with a “Parisien,” toss back a local epithet at him, with a startled audacity and a pride he cannot conceal.

“Hey, shorty!”

And the other, the Parisian, turns to the company, calls them to witness, comments with a blink and a smile:

“See that, he’s getting the hang of it.”

And others still, also Parisians, of disquieting appearance, with mysterious tattoos on their skin, about whom stories are whispered, who talk of rolling drunks, show us the familiar demonstration with a scarf of the “père François” trick, open with a knife the most firmly locked locks. Those ones attract and frighten me.

I have often heard comrades, on leaving the barracks, complain of the promiscuity, the soiling contacts, the bad smells. I do not approve of such an attitude; these are the distastes of a little miss. By a most unusual contradiction, the same people professed advanced ideas — they were even gentle anarchists, as one finds in the young Reviews, comfortably settled in the depths of fifty thousand francs of income, who take up an affection for the people out of snobbery; it is a new sport — they rebuild society as they used to fabricate decadent prose: naively and subtly. In the city of the future there will be modern-style furniture, paintings by primitives, symbolic music.

I am not one of those, and when so many cry out that one must go to the people, only to wash their hands with disgust afterward, I am going to make use of this year to live with my new comrades, come from the fields, from the factory, frankly, cordially. To tell the truth, I do not know this people. I have brushed past them, elbowed them in the street; the solicitude of my educators, my parents, kept me far from them. In vain was equality inscribed on the walls of public buildings; manners, conventions, barriers raised by pride and selfishness separated me from them.

I have seen them represented in novels, but I know well that these images are false, embellished or trivialized, deformed by the artist’s vision and the demands of Art.

Yet I have read Michelet: what a hymn in honor of their energy, their original goodness. Old Jacques Bonhomme, bent over the distant, darkened furrows, raises his earthy face and comes toward me, axe in hand, to prune injustice. By the light of pyres and fires, I see his haggard face more clearly, where hunger and suffering mark a painful imprint. Ah! that heavy tread of clod, of rancor, how it resounds through history.

It seems to me that I would like to read them those pages, in the evening, at the hour when one misses the family hearth. All our lives would be enriched by it; it would also console me a little for having to repeat, like the Bretons, that the corporal is recognized by two broad red woolen stripes on each sleeve. I express this wish without pride, without wounded vanity, simply to forge one more bond between us, to make myself useful, to teach them to know their past, that of their ancestors; for this, one would need authorizations, orders that are not forthcoming, a more keen concern for minds, a preoccupation unknown in France of asking each man, at the best moment, to make the best use of his faculties for the good of all.

I have become acquainted with the little town. Squeezed within its narrow belt of fortifications, the houses crowd and jostle. At the end of every street, one sees the rampart walk, the embankments, the glacis with their poplars of frail branches, so stripped in the rain. No sound of carriages, a few passersby, and everywhere uniforms, orderlies, soldiers on fatigue duty. From steeples fall peals of bells; bugles answer. Curious about souls, I imagine the lives of adolescents, austere, pensive with work and study within these monastic-looking walls; far from the seduction of forms and colors, their lyricisms must be raptures of the intellect. The beauty of the women there is a little sad. Besides, one breathes it everywhere, this fine perfume of sadness: in the courtyards with their worn paving stones where grass grows, in the cloister with its open-worked ogives, ruinous, ravaged by the hammer of revolutions, along the convents where the frosted glass windows have no gaze. The little town, become an immense barracks, where each year rolls the tumultuous, soon-disciplined tide of Frenchmen from every province, sees with stupor its old customs vanish, its old families scatter, its old mansions fill with the comings and goings of strangers. And slowly, with a subtle pleasure of the imagination, I try to discover, behind its present banality, its distant physiognomy; I see it as it was fifty years before, half town and half village, with its burghers harvesting their wines, picking their hops, its vintners, hod on back, pruning-hook at their knees.

I went through the streets paved with pointed cobbles. Sometimes in the small deserted squares, I made out in the gray twilight a curiously worked door, capitals, fluted columns, cartouches, effaced coats of arms. In the middle of the square stretched puddles of water where, in the gathering shadow that enveloped the facades, a corner of bright sky was reflected, washed by the downpour, all shimmering with stars.

In the working-class quarters, hovels lit up, murky glimmers filtered through the windows streaming with condensation, one heard obscene refrains. On the doorsteps, bareheaded women stood, poor, ugly, strapped in caracos, crouching in doorways like sly spiders. Their gestures of invitation were rare, and hideous.

We are beginning to know and understand one another, in the barracks room. Seated around the same table at the canteen, while the dim light filters through the tall slanted windows, while the lamplight yellows in the steam and tobacco smoke, we draw closer together.

They are like all men, good and wicked. They hurt each other, stupidly, without meaning to, for the pleasure of gross practical jokes.

Days follow days, alike, without any event to stand out in their gray, uniform weave. In the morning, while reveille sounds in the courtyard and the room orderly claps his clogs on the floor, my opening eyes contemplate the same familiar objects, the bread shelf, the dormer window, the row of beds where the sleepers’ bodies are outlined under the brown blankets. The kerosene lamp casts its smoky, wavering gleams, the tin mugs of the men going for coffee clatter in the stairways.

Then come the marches, the maneuvers, the drills. My body grows supple, my limbs acquire an unknown vigor and elasticity. Fevers, nervousness disappear in me. There are moments of suffering; crossing a snowy plain with the glare of the sun in one’s eyes revealed to me a form of torture. But I remain calm and sad.

A new being is developing in me, and it is with a keen curiosity that I study its birth. I have always been thus: terrified by the fear of identical states, tormented by vague nostalgias, haunted by the desire for other things. I know well at heart that this new being is inferior to the former one in terms of intellectuality, that this change is a gentle stupefaction: no matter, I enjoy it as a new incarnation, as an enlargement of my life toward mysterious perspectives.

Spring is late in these northern lands.

It prepares its arrival at length, with coquetries, charming hesitations. Nothing could render the uncertain, exquisite sweetness of the long, waning winters. In the sky washed by the showers, clearings of a humid, shivering blue open up; on the sodden earth, the fine needles of greening grasses sprout. Not a bud yet tints the thin branches of the poplars; yet fine days approach, for in the sunsets, warmer streams of light pour from the horizon, and in the brighter nights, warm breezes pass. Perhaps already the violets and primroses are opening beneath the hedges, among the grasses dried by winter!

Every day, after the evening soup, there is still an hour of full daylight.

I take advantage of it to slip away behind the barracks courtyard, to the embankment of the fortifications. I have found between two gabions a little propitious corner. At the foot of the sheer wall, the green waters of the canal stretch out, where heavy barges pass, daubed in bright colors. Harness bells tinkle on the towpath, dogs bark, whips crack.

Opposite, above the military dovecote, a flight of pigeons wheels. They come and go in a confused mass, in a regular flight that oscillates like a pendulum. Their wings change color, depending on how they are diversely brushed by the remnant of bluish daylight trailing through space. It is a cloud of dazzling white, or of muted gray, that sways, mingling with the gentleness of rhythm the shimmer of colors.

March twilights, full of wavering tenderness.

Men, who have so often sung you, could not profane you. Always you catch our hearts in the net of your gleams, your wandering scents. Banal joys, that awaken in our beings an ever-fresh shiver.

A slight sound of steps. It is the soldier Finoche, who, prowling nearby, joins me in my hideaway.

“Got any tobacco?”

I have tobacco, and rolling papers. He rolls a cigarette, lights it, stretches out beside me, feet in the damp grass.

Finoche is one of those “Parisians” who inspire in me curiosity and horror. Rumors circulate about him: run-ins with the law from which he extricated himself by cunning and suppleness. I have vaguely understood from his conversation that he had led in Paris the uneasy life of beasts, always on the lookout for prey, hunted by stronger ones. He had prowled in the human desert, driven by eternal instincts. So his conversation is savory, his pantomime expressive, made of gestures that, in the course of his tale, evoke the terror of the marks and the nimble play of hands of the “pals.” Most curious to study: when an NCO bullies him, he has the growls of a hyena, the cringing retreats of a sly animal ready to spring up, to show its claws, the moment the threatening gaze no longer weighs upon him. Confusedly enjoying the disapproval that surrounds him, he accentuates his roguishness out of pride. He shows with mystery a tattoo he has on the thumb of his right hand, the same one that the fellows of the penal battalions have. He says that when he arrived here, the doctor, seeing the mark, told him: “Go to La Villette; that’s where they brand the meat.” Thanks to him, I know the bridges where one can sleep in comfort, those where the drafts are so fierce that one is forced, to keep warm, to stick boards on one’s back for a blanket; I know the parks where one can daydream, far from the cops, without fear of being caught, and I know that the worst is the one by Notre-Dame, behind the Morgue: you go in through the gate and end up at the Depot straightaway — it’s a trap. And I know the mysterious names that designate the representatives of the law, the armed force, one in its formidable manifestations: I know there are flics, mules, that the gendarmes are the puppets, and the plainclothes detectives “Deibler’s boys.”

I look at him beside me in the remnant of daylight trailing on the ground. His gray eyes gleam between blinking lids; his gapped teeth are yellowed by chewing tobacco; his withered face has no age; on his clean-shaven cheeks a few stray, faded hairs twist. He has finished his cigarette: carefully, he takes the butt, puts it in the bottom of his képi, which he replaces on his head.

He confides a case of conscience:

“Would you believe it, old man, the wife of Oscar, from the fourth, you know, the redhead from Charonne. Sure, he’s got a woman in town. He copped thirty days of hard. Would you believe she sent him forty sous and a packet of tobacco. That’s all. I tell you, if I had a girl any more rotten than that, wouldn’t I lay into her.”

I vaguely agree. Didn’t M. Nisard say there were two moralities?

Night has come. Finoche, still sprawled on the grass, cleans his fingernails with his knife, a solid blade with a horn handle, whose blade is kept open by a metal ring.

I follow with my eyes that gleam of steel, cutting and cold.

It has snowed all day.

The room is drowned in shadow. Only a wan light creeps across the ceiling, reflection of the dying evening on the all-white barracks courtyard. On benches, the men surround the stove, stuffed with coal, heated to white. They hold out their cracked hands to the good warmth and smoke their pipes as they talk. The soup has just been eaten, and the room orderly stacks the plates, gives a sweep to the table. The smoky lamp is lit and its wavering light brings forth from the darkness the row of beds, the blankets neatly drawn, the tin cups hung on the hooks of the bunk-bed. While the wind rages outside, the stove roars. In the warm atmosphere where tobacco smoke drifts, there hovers an impression of comfort, of warm and heartening calm: it is almost a hearth, a family.

The door opens and in a gust of cold air that makes the lamp flicker, a newcomer enters.

He is greeted with cries, joyous exclamations.

“It’s Émile!” “Well, how are things, countryman?”

He approaches, with a grunt, grabs a handful of fire in passing, and heads for his bed, sullen. His forage cap is pulled down to his ears, the collar of his greatcoat turned up to his eyes. You can barely glimpse a corner of his puffy, gleaming face; he breathes noisily, like a beast at its manger. On the threadbare black cloth, stained with grease and engine oil, snowflakes finish melting, trickling; a puddle spreads at his feet. He undresses; his canvas smock underneath is soaked and clings to his shoulders. He mumbles confused things between his teeth: “Pig of a job.”

I see him better now. He is fat as lard, his small eyes with pale lashes are sunk in the fat that cushions his cheeks, a few wisps of moustache droop at the corners of his lips. His features are frozen in a dull stupor.

The veterans fill us in.

He is a Vosgian. When he came here, at first he astonished everyone by his voracity — he would devour a great tureen of stew. Nothing could ever be made of him; he doesn’t even know how to march in step. On guard at the arsenal, he failed to salute the general, mistaking him for a fireman. His pleasure is to go into the courtyard, pick up stones, and throw them far, so far that you wouldn’t believe it. They make him sing songs, dance dances, and men from other barracks rooms come to watch the show. He had been sent to a fort; no doubt they sent him back down this evening.

I understand. A woodcutter, sawyer, or shepherd of the high pastures, accustomed to living with his cows whose bells ring up there in the keen air over meadows carpeted with thick gentians and anemones as broad as water-lilies, he could not bend his indolent body and thick limbs to the complicated gymnastics, his rudimentary soul to the mechanisms of discipline. When blows rained down on his back, he shut himself into a patient, robust stubbornness, like the beasts he used to drive into the barns at evening.

They made him a brakeman on the little railway. From then on he lived in engine oil, soot, coal whose glittering flakes clung to his rough fleece. Filthy enough to scare you — it is an enormous joy when a fatigue detail of sturdy fellows, ordered for the occasion, leads him to the fountain and scrubs him on the edge of the trough with a couch-grass brush.

Without a word, he rolls his blanket, opens his bed, lies down.

Other stokers arrive, who tell us he nearly caused a derailment: a switch error. He won’t escape his fifteen days of hard punishment.

And remarks are exchanged, laughter breaks out. “What a good joke. No danger. We’ll have a laugh.”

The hours pass: roll call, the duty sergeant passes in a rush through the room; they go to bed, the lamp is put out. Ten o’clock: lights-out cries its long solitary sob into the night.

Suddenly, the door opens softly: mysterious shadows slip into the room, a lit lantern casts dancing gleams on the walls and lets us — us greenhorns, gaping on our beds — glimpse a squad of men in full-dress uniform, white gloves, chin-strap down, dress dolman, stiff under arms.

Another, hooded in a cloak with a cape, with nothing visible of his face but a long curling moustache, approaches Émile’s bed and wakes him. They read him his sentence, arrived by telegram from the Ministry of War. They show him the order, covered with stamps and signatures affixed at the office. He is condemned for a grave offense to be shot.

Mad with terror, he burrows into his bed, sheets over his head, comes out again frantic, crawls, shirt flying, across the floor, begs for mercy.

Grave, executing the manual of arms with imperturbable seriousness, the squad renders honors to the condemned man.

Sly, a man who has slipped into the shadows lashes his bare buttocks with the full volley of water from the jug. Everyone laughs to splitting, and he, delivered from his anguish, laughs, candid.

AT CAMP

The camp at Eaubonne.

Picture a plain, bare, immense. Here and there a few small woods of stunted, scraggly pines, stretching their branches at ground level, dwarfed by all that expanse. Chalk everywhere; the works, the redoubts, the batteries outlined in the distance look like mounds of snow; disconcerting whiteness under the heavy July heat falling from the sky, heated white, like a metal plate. The humus layer is so thin in places that it clings to passersby’s feet and the trace of their steps stands out in raw whiteness against the dark tint of the soil. At noon, the hot air rises, vibrates, undulates, and objects appear with wavering outlines, as seen through flowing water.

We are housed under tents. Twelve in each. We sleep on the ground, our pallets spread on the soil. The first nights were hard, and one had to remove stones from the earth that bruised our backs; for sheets, a white canvas sack you crawl into as soon as evening roll call sounds, and which they call “the meat sack.” We have gotten used to it, and now this life is almost gentle.

Is it a soul come from distant ancestors, the wanderers of the ancient ages, that thrills and pulses and sings in the depths of my being, drunk with open air and light under this thin, flapping canvas, bathed in the day’s reflections, where on pure nights falls the glittering of the stars?

Sleep is light there, and its weave so thin and subtle that dreams pass through without losing the golden dust of their wings.

Oh! to speak of the joy of wakings, in the light. A cannon is fired over our heads at the experimental battery. The volley of sound passes through the camp, rebounds off the tents, makes the poles supporting them tremble. And at once, outside, reveille sings in the brassy sonorities of the trumpets. Half awake, I perceive above my head the confused whiteness of dawn; yet the dream continues. It seems to me that I am sailing on shining seas, lying at the foot of the mast, under the sail that flaps in the wind, toward blessed isles.

In the evening, from the parched plain rises the wandering soul of humble plants growing close to the ground — lichens, mosses, sprigs of thyme and heather. The resinous scent of the pines, heated by the sun, mingles with it. The rising wind brings them blended; they prowl, penetrate through the half-open tent flap, through which one sees a few stars poised at the rim of the horizon, blazing in the blue night.

Suddenly a bugle call rings out. It bursts, it rises from every fold of the ground, in the silence of the night. The dry earth conducts sounds wonderfully, and my listening ear misses none of the sonorous vibrations. It is lights-out; it begins near us in hoarse, deep notes from the cavalry trumpets. Over there, the infantry bugles take it up, brighter and more joyous; the hunting horns add unexpected variations. For long minutes, the plain sings. It is always the same broad, cadenced song, where the slow, soothed rhythms speak magnificently of human fatigue and the consoling serenity of rest. Here, in this immense setting, far from cities and noise, under a sky studded with stars, the song takes on a character of august solemnity. It speaks, under the impassive stars, of the majesty of human suffering, of sleep like death — it rises, it brushes the stars with its wings of brass, while one seems to catch, in the light breezes passing close to the ground, the breathing of thousands of men, stretched out on the plain, side by side and fraternal.

Under the tent, in the evening.

The day has been hard; we marched across the plain from dawn to dusk, in the blinding glare of the sun on the dismal chalk deserts.