The Flood (5 page)

The sun was rising as Clérian finished telling the others about his dream. A bugle called somewhere to the north, the sound wafting on the early-morning breeze. It was the signal:
disbanded
troops were to assemble around the flag.

The three men got up, taking their weapons. They were about to set off, looking for one last time at the remains of the fire, when Flem came running through the long grass. His boots were white with dust.

‘I’ve run so fast I can’t tell you where I’ve been. Trees were whizzing around me. The sound of my footsteps lulled me into a weird sleep; my eyes shut but I kept on running, not even slowing down.

‘I reached a deserted hill. The hot sun beat down on the rocks; I couldn’t stop running because my soles would burn. I hurried to the top.

‘There I was, busting a gut, when I noticed another man, climbing slowly. He wore a crown of thorns. He carried a heavy load on his shoulders, and his face was soaked in sweat. He found it hard going, stumbling at every step.

‘The ground was burning hot; I couldn’t watch him struggle. I climbed to the top and waited for him under a tree. Then I saw that it was a cross he was carrying. To go by his crown, and his purple robes, splashed with mud, I thought that he might be a king. So I was mighty glad to see him suffer.

‘He had soldiers behind him, hustling him with pikes. When they got to the peak they stripped him and and stretched him out onto the ominous-looking cross.

‘The man smiled sadly. He opened his hands nice and wide for the executioners; they banged a couple of nails in, the blood dripping. Then he crossed his feet; one nail was enough to do the job.

‘On his back he looked up silently into the sky. Two tears ran slowly down his cheeks. He did not feel them, smiling as though he’d given up.

‘They raised the cross. The weight of his own body stretched his wounds. It was horrible. I heard his bones crack. There was a long shudder; then, he looked back up to the skies.

‘I stared at him. He was brave, in death. “This man is no king,” I said. Then I felt pity; I shouted at the soldiers, finish it, stab him through the heart.

‘A warbler was singing on the cross. Its song was sad; to me it sounded like a virgin’s sobbing.

‘“Flames get their colour from blood,” it said, “flowers get their colour from blood, blood makes naked lovers blush. When I stood on the sand, my feet bled; when I brushed the branches of an oak tree, my wings bled.”

‘“I met a righteous man, and I followed him. I had just washed myself in the spring, and my coat was clean. I sang, Rejoice, my feathers; the rain that falls from all the
killing will not sully you now, not when you’re on this man’s shoulders.”

‘“Today I sing: Weep, warbler of Golgotha, weep! Blood from the man who gave you shelter stains your feathers. He came to restore our purity, and alas! men leave him with no choice but to smear me in the dew of his own wounds.”

‘“My faith wavers; I weep for my spoiled coat. O Jesus! Where will I find another like you to give me shelter? O
hapless
lord, who will I find to wash my feathers, stained with your blood?”

‘The crucified man listened. His eyes grew heavy-lidded; death was in the air. His mouth twisted with pain. He looked at the bird in gentle reproach. His smile was as bright and peaceful as hope itself.

‘Then he screamed. His head hung down on his chest, and the warbler flew away, sobbing. The skies darkened, and the earth trembled under the shadows.

‘I was still running, in my sleep. It was dawn. The valleys awakened, bright under the morning mist. The sky was clear after the overnight storm; the leaves were greener for all the rain. But my path was still lined with the same thorns that had grazed me the day before; my boots crunched over the same jagged stones; the same menacing snakes slithered through the bushes as I ran. The blood of the righteous man had washed through the earth’s veins, but it hadn’t given back its lost innocence.

‘The warbler flew overhead.

‘“O, I am so sad. There is no spring pure enough for me to bathe in. See how the earth is just as wicked as it was? Jesus is dead. But the grass isn’t growing… O, it’s just another murder.”’

The bugle could still be heard.

‘Fellers,’ said Gneuss, ‘it’s a dirty job. We can’t sleep. We kill men and they come back to haunt us. Like you, I’ve had nightmares a long time. A demon squats on my chest. Here’s the thing. I’ve been killing thirty years now; I need to get some sleep. Let’s leave it to someone else. I know a place where they need some extra pairs of hands for the ploughing. Do you want to do an honest day’s work for your money?’

‘We do.’

The soldiers dug a big hole at the foot of a rock. They buried their weapons. They went for a wash in the river. Then they disappeared, arm in arm, around the bend in the road.

War! Terrible word. To Frenchmen of my generation – the generation whose fiftieth is behind them – it evokes three memories above all: the expedition to the Crimea, the Italian campaign, and the catastrophe of 1870.
1
What victories, what defeats – and what a lesson!

Granted, war is vile. It is sickening to see nations at one another’s throats. Progressive liberals say that there must be no war, envisaging a time when nations will engage one another cordially. There are some thinkers, much admired, who see the world not in terms of nations, but in terms of
humanity
, and who forecast an era of universal concord. But these ideas don’t last five minutes when there’s a threat to the homeland! Even the philosophers grab their guns and start shooting; these declarations of brotherhood are drowned out by the cries of
kill
! that rise up from every patriotic heart. Because we have to have wars; they’re a necessary evil, like death. For civilisation to flourish, you might say, you need to make sure that the dungheap is well stocked. Life is nothing without death, and wars are like those antediluvian cataclysms that made it possible for humans to live on this earth.

We have become soft; we cry over every lost life. But do we even know how many people this planet needs?
Life is sacred
, we let ourselves think. The ancient Greeks beheld terrible massacres, but they didn’t then rush off and advocate some utopian fraternalism. Maybe these stoics had the more
honourable
view. Be a man, and accept that death goes about its strange work unseen, in the night; accept that people just die, and it so happens that they sometimes die in greater numbers. This is the rational way to think, when all’s said and done, because if you get worked up about war, you have to get angry about every other human failing. Even the bellyaching, bleeding-heart intellectuals must see that war will remain
the tool of progress, until we perfect civilisation and celebrate eternal peace. We are far from perfecting civilisation, and so we’ll surely be fighting for centuries to come. It’s the fashion, these days, to call war a hangover from our barbarian beginnings, and to say that, under the Republic, we’ll be rid of it. But when that siren rings out on the border, and you hear the bugle in the street, we’ll all be reaching for a gun. Because war is in the blood.

Victor Hugo once wrote that only kings wanted war – all their subjects wanted to do was to kiss and cuddle. That’s nothing but a poet’s dream, alas. Hugo has been the high priest of the sort of fantasy that I’m talking about. He
celebrated
a United States of Europe; he urged the importance of international community, and prophesied a new Golden Age. What could be nicer? But you can be brothers all you like, what matters most of all is that you love each other. And nations do not love each other. Why pretend otherwise? It’s true, I admit, that a vulnerable monarch might take a gamble and declare war against a neighbour, hoping for a victory to tighten his grip on the throne. The thing is, right from the very first battle – win or lose – that war belongs to the people, and they fight for themselves; if they aren’t fighting for themselves, they don’t fight. And that’s to say nothing about wars that really do involve the entire nation. Let’s imagine, for instance, that one day France and Germany find
themselve
s
squaring up to each other again. Everyone will be fired up – and not for the sake of
the Republic
or
the empire
or
the monarchy
or
the government
. From coast to coast men will answer the bugle’s call, trembling with anticipation. Whether we knew it or not, the seeds were sown twenty years ago; and if ever the time should come, war will break out over our land like an overflowing harvest.

I say it again: three times in my life I have heard the eerie sound of War beating its wings over France. It begins with a distant rustling; you think gales are on the way. The sound gets louder. There’s a crash, and every heart beats faster; people turn giddy with enthusiasm as the country feels the need to conquer and kill. Then, when the men are gone and the noise has died down, an anxious silence takes over.
Everyone
listens out for the first cry from the army: will it be a cry of victory, or a cry of defeat? It’s a terrible time. There are contradictory reports. You seize upon the tiniest scraps, analysing every word, until the hour of truth. And what an hour that is – sweet joy, or bitter despair!

At the time of the Crimean War, I was fourteen. I was still a boarder at school in Aix, shut away with two or three
hun
dred
other kids in an old Benedictine convent. The long corridors and vast halls retained something of its former gloominess. Its two courtyards were more cheerful, under the glorious southern skies that stretched out vast and blue. I did suffer there, but I remember that school fondly.

At fourteen, I wasn’t exactly a child. But looking back today I see how ignorant we were. World news didn’t reach that forgotten corner. The sad old town was a dead capital, slumbering in barren countryside, and the school, close to the fortifications, slept even more deeply. In all the time that I was cloistered there, I don’t recall ever hearing anything about one single political scandal. Only the Crimean War had any impact – and it was probably several weeks before we heard about that.

I smile, thinking back to what war meant to us provincial schoolboys. It was all very vague at first. The fighting was happening in a land so distant, so strange, and so savage, that we imagined the scene to be like something from the Arabian Nights, come to life. We couldn’t have told you where exactly it was taking place, and I don’t think that any of us thought for a minute to look into the atlases we each had at our fingertips. Our teachers, it must be said, kept us in total ignorance of the modern world. They read the papers, they knew what was going on; but they never spoke to us about it, and if we had asked, they would have sent us packing, back to our essays and exercises. We knew nothing for certain, except that France was fighting in the Orient; why, we didn’t know.

But some things we did know. We repeated the old jokes about the Cossacks; we knew the names of two or three Russian generals, and we imagined these generals to have heads pretty much like monsters, gobbling up small children. We never once thought France could lose; to us that seemed perverse. Then there were gaps. As the campaign dragged on, we forgot that there was a war on, for months at a time, until the day that some snippet of news brought us back, breathless with excitement. I can’t tell you if we knew about the battles as they took place, or if we experienced the thrill of capturing Sebastopol.
2
It was all a muddle. To us, the reality was Virgil and Homer – more worrying to us than any modern-day quarrel among nations.

I do remember the game that was all the rage for a while in the playground. We split up into two groups, and marked two lines in the dust. Then we fought. It was a simpler version of prisoner’s base; you had to drag the other lot over behind your line. One group were the Russians; the other, the French. The Russians were meant to lose, but sometimes that didn’t
happen; there was an awful, furious racket. At the end of the week, the head had to ban this charming pastime: two pupils had been brought into the infirmary with cracked skulls.

One of the most distinguished combatants was a tall
fair-haired
boy who always got picked to be General. Louis was from an old Breton family that had moved down south, and he looked like a winner. He was very fit and very strong. I can see him now, a handkerchief tied round his forehead like a soldier’s plume, sides cinched in by a leather belt, leading his troops on, arm aloft as if he were brandishing a sword. We admired him, respected him even. Funny, he had a twin brother, Julien, who was much shorter than him, delicate and frail, and who found these games very distressing. Whenever we split into two sides, he slunk away to watch from a stone bench, looking sad and a bit frightened. One day Louis stumbled under the blows that rained down from a gang of boys, and Julien cried out, pale, shivering, swooning like a woman. The two brothers adored each other, and none of us would have dared tease the little one for being a coward; we were afraid of what the bigger one could do.

My memories of these twins are bound up with my
memories
of the time. Towards the spring I became a day-pupil; I didn’t board anymore and came to school only for the seven o’clock classes. The two brothers were also day-pupils. We were inseparable. We lived in the same street, so we waited for each other to walk to school. Louis was old for his years, and wanted adventure; he led us astray. It was decided that we would leave for school at six, in order to have a whole hour of freedom in which we could be
men
. Being men, for us, meant smoking cigars and drinking alcohol in a seedy backstreet bar that Louis had discovered. Cigars and drink made us sick as dogs; but what a feeling when we opened the door to the bar,
making sure nobody saw us, looking left, then right, before going in!

These fun and games took place towards the end of winter. Some mornings, I remember, the rain lashed down. We waded through, turning up to class soaked. When the mornings became clear and mild, we got the mad notion of going off to watch the soldiers. The road to Marseille passes through Aix; the regiments came into town from Avignon, slept a night, and then the next day made their way to the coast. At the time, more troops were being sent to the Crimea, cavalry and artillery especially. Not a week went by without troops passing through town. A local newspaper even advertised their visits in advance, to give some notice to the families where the men lodged. Only, we didn’t read the paper; so our great difficulty was finding out before going to sleep whether or not the soldiers would be setting off in the morning. They left at five, so we had to get up very early. Often it was pointless.

What a happy time! Louis and Julien shouted me down from the street, where there was not a soul to be seen. I rushed out. Though the days were as mild as in spring, it would be chilly as we walked together through the deserted town. If a regiment was about to leave, the soldiers would assemble on the Cours Mirabeau, in front of the hotel where the colonel usually stayed. We craned our necks excitedly as soon as we turned the corner at the Rue d’Italie. If there was nobody there: disaster! And there was often nobody there. We missed our beds – though we’d never say so – wandering around at a loose end until seven, having no idea what to do with our freedom. What a treat, on the other hand, to turn the corner and see the Cours packed with men and horses! The cold morning was filled with a spectacular crash and clatter. The soldiers arrived from every direction, drums pounding and
bugles blazing. The officers had trouble getting everyone into line. Gradually, order established itself, the ranks assembling, and we chatted to troops, darting between the horses’ legs at the risk of getting crushed. We weren’t the only ones
enjoying
the show. Shopkeepers appeared one by one; there were people with business in town; all the early risers. Soon there was a crowd. The sun rose. The gold and steel of the uniforms glistened in the morning light.

On the Cours of that peaceful town, still deep in slumber, we saw dragoons, cavalrymen, lancers, and all the branches of the big cavalry and the light cavalry. But our favourites, the ones that we were craziest about, were the cuirassiers. They dazzled us, sitting astride their stout horses, the sunlight glinting from their breastplates. Their helmets glowed under the rising sun; their ranks were like rows of suns that cast dancing rays on the houses round about. If we discovered that there would be cuirassiers leaving, we got up at four, desperate to set eyes on the performance.

At last the colonel would appear. The colours were kept safe overnight at the place where he stayed; now they were
unfurled
. All at once, after two or three orders were bellowed out, the troops set off. They marched down the Cours; a rising drumbeat set our hearts racing, as the first hooves clapped onto the hard ground. We ran to keep pace with the head of the column, where the band was banging out a quickstep. First, three shrill bugle notes readied the musicians; then the brass started up, drowning out everything else. The last notes died away outside the town gates, in the countryside. We turned left onto the Marseille road, a pleasant stretch lined with hundred-year-old elms. The horses trotted off, scattering a little on the dusty open highway. We felt like we were going to war too. The town was far away behind us, and we’d
forgotten all about school; we ran and ran, carried away with our adventure. We went off to war once a week.

Ah, those sweet mornings! It was six o’clock, and the sun, already high, lit the land with huge slanting rays. There was a mild warmth in the chilly morning breeze. Birds flew up from hedges. The distant meadows were bathed in a pink mist. Amid this smiling horizon marched these beautiful soldiers, their breastplates glowing, the cuirassiers shining like stars. The road curved suddenly down into a wide valley. The people who had come from town followed no further; soon, we were the only ones in pursuit. We went down the slope and, at the very bottom, came to a bridge that crossed the river. Only there did we start to worry. It must be nearly seven o’clock; if we didn’t want to miss school, then we had just about enough time to get there – running. Often we forgot altogether; we pressed on, playing truant, then getting up to no good until noon, hiding in the grass-covered hollows beside the waterfall. Sometimes we went no further than the bridge, sitting on the stone parapet and keeping the regiment in view as it proceeded up the opposite slope of the valley. It was a rousing sight. The road went straight up the hillside for nearly two kilometres. The horses eased up, and we saw the men get smaller, swaying rhythmically. At first each breastplate and each helmet looked like a sun. Then these suns dwindled, and soon it looked as if an army of stars was on the march. Finally, the last man disappeared and the road was empty, leaving only memories of the beautiful regiment that had passed.

We were just kids. But these sights made us serious
nonetheless
. We watched in silence as the regiment climbed the hill, in despair at the thought of losing it. When it disappeared, we had a lump in our throat; for an instant, we kept watching the faraway rock behind which it had just vanished. Would the
regiment ever return? Would it come back down the hill one day? These questions filled us with a vague sadness. Goodbye, beautiful regiment!

Our excursions tired out Julien. He wouldn’t have come with us so far, but he didn’t want to be separated from his brother. All the walking made him achy, and he had a phobia of horses. I remember one day that we were lying in the fields, late for school after having followed an artillery unit. Louis was giddy with excitement. We ate an omelette in town for lunch, then he took us to the river, where he was set on swimming. As soon as he was old enough, he said, he’d enlist.

‘No!’ Julien flung his arms around Louis’s neck, white as a sheet. ‘No!’

Louis laughed and called him silly.

‘They’ll kill you,’ said Julien. ‘I know they will.’

He poured his heart out to us that day, wound up by our teasing. The soldiers were very ugly. He did not see why we were so interested in them. Everything was their fault: if there were no soldiers, there would be no fighting. He hated war. It terrified him. He’d find a way to stop his brother having anything to do with it. His disgust was overwhelming. It was pathological.

Weeks and months passed. We’d had enough of the troops and had come up with another game: going fishing in the morning, then eating our catch in a run-down tavern. The water was icy; Julien caught pneumonia, and almost died. At school, we didn’t talk about war. Homer and Virgil engrossed us more than ever. Suddenly we heard that France were the victors, which seemed to us only proper. Then the regiments started coming through once more, this time from the other direction. We weren’t interested. Yet we did see two or three; with half the men missing, they seemed less beautiful now.
Such was the Crimean War, in France, for children cooped up in a provincial boarding school.