Scraps Page 18

  Fate having led me to assume, by disguising me as soldier, a more or less new costume (since I had experienced only a brief period in the barracks when I was younger), playing at being a soldier the way a child amuses himself with a dress-up outfit represented the simplest solution, and it was therefore those of my colleagues who seemed to me “in the know” from a military point of view—those whose responsibilities and manners made them most capable of playing opposite me—to whom I felt gradually drawn, as though among them I would discover my most agreeable playmates if not my best friends.

  With the career NCOs (of whom one was a native of Oran with a Spanish name who displayed an alarming virtuosity when he pretended to be the victim of an alcoholic delirium in order to frighten one of our roommates all too prone to believe that the isolation, the sun, and the drinks sold at the mess, which was under his management, could only cause a number of us to suffer fearful sunstrokes) I was on very good terms, as I also was with the corporal of the Second Etranger in charge of the radio station, a lad of very correct bearing with whom I enjoyed chatting about the ways and customs of the very particular corps to which he belonged. But, whether pen pushers in kepis or perfect mercenaries whose only law was their discipline and whose only faith was their worship of the Legion, these professionals were, each in his own more relaxed or more rigid way, neither more nor less than guard dogs. Even though of all my associations in the camp they were the only authentic soldiers—and no doubt it would be more accurate to say: because of the very fact that they were 100 percent soldiers exactly circumscribed by the limitations of their duties—it was with a partner of a completely different sort that I finally performed my comedy, a reservist older than I, who had nothing professional about him and even enjoyed recalling that he was there, really, only as a “guest.”

  The name of this older man, who surpassed me not so much in the number of his years (since the difference between us was not very great) as in the fact that he had fought in the other war, came straight out of one of our old chivalric romances. Yet there was nothing about him that seemed at first sight to correspond to a name of such ancient nobility except, perhaps, his appearance, which was that of a worn-out actor and led him to resemble someone who had escaped from another age or, more accurately, who belonged to no particular epoch or condition, a look one sometimes sees in the city on the faces of experts in so-called accommodating roles, men too habitually accustomed to making themselves other than they are to retain in their physical appearance those particular characteristics that would allow an individual, even if we were to see him stripped of all clothing, all uniform, to remain most often someone we could to a large extent situate socially.

  With this companion, who commanded the “first of the second” (the first 75-caliber gun, of the four that made up the second of our batteries) I immediately felt in sympathy; his Legionnaire-style peaked cap with its buff covering, his gaiters of unbleached linen, and the ample cavalry coat furnished him in Oran by the store at the Eckmühl barracks, his awkward, rather lopsided deportment—like that of a horseman whose bearing relaxes as soon as his feet touch the ground or like that of someone who has been strolling around for a long time without any precise destination and begins dragging his feet—his whole picturesque exterior (apparently not at all calculated and, as far as his clothing went, not dependent upon any recourse to fantastic accessories except, perhaps, the gaiters of unbleached linen similar to those that I too thought proper to add to my outfit before leaving Paris), above all that face with its thin, unobliging lips contrasting with eyes as lively and sensitive as those of certain animals, that tanned, hairless face cut by thick eyebrows the same silvered black as his crewcut hair (which sprang up densely as soon as the cap was removed) and, giving piquancy to all this, an accent I knew, as soon as we met, to be from the eastern region of the Pyrenees—these various traits immediately seemed to me the descriptive signs of a figure prepared to let himself be swept up by the imbroglio of the war as he would be by that of a commedia dell’arte.

  Close to the beginning of his Mémoires (of which I once read with enthusiasm the first chapters though I confess I never finished the reading project in which I finally got bogged down and which I never thought, as an adult, of taking up again) General Marbot devotes some affectionate pages to the memory of the person he calls “my mentor Pertelet,” a seasoned soldier of long standing who took him under his wing when he was just starting out in the military profession. As far as I myself personally am concerned (as, of course, I am working on something akin to my memoirs but never found anything whatever at the bottom of my knapsack to indicate that I was destined for the career of general, or even for the dignity of a reserve officer), I was not taught very much—if I honestly try to add it up—by that older man whom I nevertheless like to regard as having been for me what the veteran Pertelet was for the young Marbot and to whom I too feel I should address a cordial thought. The gustatory pleasure of herring roe preserved in cans (“Bonbons!” he called it, this caviar of the meagerly paid soldier, as salmon roe are the caviar of the middle class); the pure joys of a friendship that had come about by chance, true, but was confirmed by certain shared tastes including, along with the liking for herring roe and other barracks-room delicacies, an inclination to spend our free Sundays strolling in the desert; the morality circumscribed by that camaraderie and reduced more or less to the laws of a trade-guild capable, in its highest form, of standing the test of fire; if to this I add a disgust for bourgeois philistinism (in a rather Ecole-des-Beaux-Arts spirit) I believe I will have covered the basis for the friendship between my mentor and me. No doubt the most substantial thing I learned in his company was the potential value of living this way in company with another, the understanding between us no longer being based upon sharing the same sort of ardor, as in the friendships of our younger days, but on the small joys we appreciated together and which we knew we were almost the only ones—at least under the conditions of the experience—to be able to appreciate this way. A friendship that is based less on a complete harmony than on affinities difficult to calculate and, though free of disturbance and violence, has some of the characteristics of a love affair in that, like the latter, it needs no other justification than the fact that it exists.

  Whether it exists between very young people or between men who have reached maturity and left far behind them the age at which one romantically appeals to a secret society sort of mentality, there is scarcely any friendship that completely forgoes signs of recognition and does not seek to affirm itself through gestures of a ritual nature. Like all human affections—starting with love, which, in its various forms, is rooted in the mysteries of biology and is only secondarily a mode of social relations—friendship needs a certain formality, which will be more than a simple obedience of the laws of courtesy, whose principle, in the end, varies little from one milieu to another (since it is always a matter of showing the other person that one sees him as fellow creature) and will tend in a more or less concerted fashion to demonstrate by ceremonial acts—performed in addition to the trivial exchanges of civilities required by politeness—that a particular bond has thus been established between two or more people united by a reciprocal affection. In the same way, friendship will often be based on certain details of appearance or behavior that will act in the same way as a password and, inclining one to think that they correspond to something more general of which they are merely the outer blossoming, will appear symptomatic of the possibility of an amicable relationship.

  If I myself was a bit of an outsider in relation to my fellow soldiers in the Twenty-second BOA and beyond that was also anxious to avoid the exclusive company of that “intelligentsia” overly convinced of its own superiority, my friend, too, occupied an isolated position within the group of noncommissioned artillery officers, since he was the only one of them who could be described as an “intellectual”: as a civilian, he had actually worked as a designer and architect attached to a government service in
one of the most famous cities in the Moslem part of Africa. Not only were we therefore in some sense displaced in relation to our respective entourages but because of our vocations we both felt, almost to the same degree, a commitment to the continent of Africa, and this differentiated us as much from my comrades the chemists from the mother country as from his comrades the artillerymen, who were inhabiting the region of the Oran only by chance. This shared attachment to a land different from our native land no doubt represented—with all that may be involved in loving things that are situated elsewhere—the most serious basis for our mutual sympathy.

  It seems to me we hardly ever spoke of this. Our relations were more or less limited to being table companions surrounded by many others, so that ordinarily the conversations we had were disjointed and general, amid the din of the mess hall. Droll or indignant comments on the latest thing the colonel had done that day; teasing remarks about one or another of our officers or colleagues; occasionally some memory from the past: Sunday excursions in the back country of Morocco on his motorcycle, my trip to Black Africa and the various summers I spent in Spain, comical episodes from our artistic life, his activity as artilleryman in the other “war to end all wars” and his hearing, which had been perceptibly dulled by the discharges of the 75-mm guns—our chats rarely went farther than that, and except for frequent diatribes against everything opposed to our ideal of freedom, scarcely ventured into the areas of morality or politics. About me, he knew that I was married; about him, I knew that he was divorced, incapable as he was of allowing himself to be in the least restrained. Search my mind as I may, I am almost certain we never exchanged any other confidence.

  This friendship, though not effusive (perhaps because it did not go beyond the limits of a pleasant companionship, as fragile as most relationships one forms away from one’s own country), nevertheless had what I would call its “good times” before disappearing behind the screen of fog pulled down by the defeat and the years of occupation, a period at the beginning of which we would send each other news from time to time (vague news in which current events, too intense not to be thenceforth the touchstone of every friendship, only intervened very distantly), referring in our letters to memories of our season in the desert without being able to be sure that we were always thinking the same thing and finally, my own indolence playing a part, ceasing to write altogether. One of those great moments of communion—which at the time made us think we had rediscovered for our own use the marvelous tonic of fraternity—was a beautifully limpid, dry night we experienced, after an evening spent chatting (and drinking a little, only just as much as was proper) in the room my friend shared with a few of his assistants from the artillery: as a way of honoring this companion from the Pyrénées-Orientales department, I decided that before separating we should all dance a sardana, which we did as best we could under the starry sky in a rather chaotic round which (for lack of an orchestra and because of the total ignorance of my partners, including the Pyreneen himself, concerning Catalan music) was backed up only by my own vocal accompaniment. It was not hard for my imagination to transmute this nocturnal gesticulation, executed as conclusion to a barracks-room party, into a mystical dance of Corybants or something approaching it.

  Our other great moments were in the sporting atmosphere of the shooting sessions that we had, when the nice clean barrels would launch their toxic projectiles at the sheep which some mokhaznis in rubber suits and masks—stiff golems or deep-sea divers—would afterwards bring by truck to the laboratory, where their viscera would be examined for a voluminous report on the results (satisfactory or not) of these massacres, a first rough version of the fate to which men were eventually to be subjected.

  At daybreak we would set out in trucks for the firing range, which was many miles away, for if the shooting had taken place too close to our buildings, the wind might have blown the poisons we were spreading back on us or toward connecting points. For me, these outings did not seem to have to do with war but, instead, recalled the railway trips I took with my teammates to the Columbes stadium during the only year when I played rugby. In the same vehicle as I, the artificer, there were other people belonging to the general staff, notably one of the Belgian legionnaires from the radio station, the one who told how in Indochina his comrades and he ate boa meat, finding it excellent food, and who toward the end of our campaign offered to remain alone with the mokhaznis to guard our Base 2 (abandoned during many months of the year because of the torrid heat) as long as they left enough wine for him.

  Ordinarily, my place was alongside the officers who were directing the gunfire, positioned up on a building whose terrace shook under our feet when the din reached its height. Once suitably stunned by the first detonations, I found it rather agreeable to be swept up by this outburst, a short distance from the guns but not so close to them for an impressionable nervous system to experience too much pain from it. The spectacle—a real battle scene, with flames and plumes of smoke, the gun crew busying themselves about the gun commanders who lifted their right arms and then lowered them as they shouted “Fire!”—was also one of the most exciting imaginable and, knowing that one risked nothing, one was all too likely to forget those other living creatures—the unfortunate sheep—who paid quite vilely for the operation: invisible, because very far away (and also penned behind low walls), they were only a theoretical target, reduced to the post that showed where they were and that we were delighted to see (though this actually happened only once) so precisely struck that it flew up into the air. Witnessing these shootings, I understood the pleasure to be found in handling high-quality firearms effectively and how a person who is not completely disabled by fear does not necessarily have to be a sadist to find some joy in the activity of war.

  This, however, was only small-scale warfare except where the sheep were concerned, and my enthusiasm was not even great enough to make me forget altogether the horror that had always been inspired in me by things that were too noisy: detonators, firework bombs, ships’ foghorns, cathedral bells heard from too close by, everything that explodes too suddenly and makes one jump or whose powerful vibrations seem to be heard not only by the ears but by the belly and the whole surface of the raw-nerved body. Whereas my duty—according to one of our main officers, who never had the slightest idea I was shirking it because he stayed at an observation post situated near the targets—was to run to each gun that “misfired” and immediately put aside the cartridge that had not exploded, I contented myself with counting up the cartridges that remained after the shooting was over—these had to be the defective cartridges, since the entire contents of the crates of ammunition were put into the breeches. The sin was venial, no doubt, and I could without remorse disobey the instructions of a finicky officer; but I have always wondered what more serious defections I might have been capable of if a real shooting had been involved—let’s say, to be more precise about it: a reciprocal shooting, with fatal results on both sides—and not this sort of shooting which only the animals we were using as targets could have taken for anything but an exercise. I still recall, with a bad conscience, those “misfires” due to the fact that the capsule that was supposed to make the cartridge explode did not detonate when struck by the hammer, a negative phenomenon rather disconcerting to the novice: his entire body tense, he was already preparing himself for the recoil of the detonation and was left, in the absence of that detonation, in the situation of someone about to tip over into a void suddenly opening before his feet (or someone abruptly stepping down because of a change in level he did not anticipate), at the same time that the initiating gesture of the gun commander in charge of the firing, since it was not followed by the expected noise, came the completely gratuitous—and dizzying—start of something that did not continue.

  Coming back from the shooting, our mess was always very lively; we ate and drank with an appetite even keener than usual and spoke loudly, not only because the dry, excruciating noise of the 75s had deafened us but because the gunfire had gi
ven us all the feeling of taking part in a heroic action. My mentor was pleased with his team, which he felt was well in hand after several sessions of shooting, homogeneous, and in a condition to acquit itself properly if he had to come under fire with it. I always listened attentively to what he said about the war he had fought and especially (for I thought I could learn from it) his experience of fear, since he in no way hid the fact that he had been more afraid and had had more trouble overcoming his fear after being wounded, just like a bullfighter who loses confidence after a serious accident because he can no longer believe he is invulnerable. It was during one of those conversations inspired by our artillery sessions that he suggested to me—like a landed proprietor inviting his guest to shoot a few rabbits with him in his warren, a courtesy the guest can’t refuse without the risk of appearing to be someone who does not deserve such friendliness and who would be better avoided in the future, or else like a host lending his wife or daughter to a stranger passing through, who can’t decline the offer without a serious infraction of custom—that he suggested to me a sort of “honorary shot” which I would fire in his place at one of the next sessions.