The Red Collar (10 page)

“Did you take part in the mutinies?”

Lantier was surprised he'd seen no mention of this in the prisoner's military file. Quite the opposite, it was in 1917 that Morlac had been decorated for an act of heroism.

“No,” Morlac confirmed.

“Were there any in your unit?”

“Stupid gestures. Several boys mutilated themselves in order to be evacuated. Selfish little creeps who wanted to save their own skins. They thought they were clever but they were usually found out, they were judged and sometimes they were shot. What was the difference?”

Lantier had had experience of an incident like this in his unit during the war: A young baker's assistant had managed to lose two fingers by brandishing his arm over the top of his trench while on night guard duty. The lines had been very close together. Some poor fellow on the other side must have realized what he wanted and fired. It was a sordid affair but, as platoon commander, Lantier had had no choice but to send the kid off to a court-martial. He didn't know what had happened to him.

“With the Russians we had other ideas. We saw things on a bigger scale.”

The disturbing side of Morlac's character was now out in the daylight. So far Lantier hadn't managed to grasp the source of the wariness mingled with fascination that the prisoner inspired in him. And now, all of a sudden, he understood: It was this combination of reserve and megalomania, his feigned modesty and his profound conviction that he was cleverer than everyone else. Morlac was a dwarf consumed with giant-sized ambitions. It was hard to know whether to pity him for keeping such huge ideals shut away inside him, or laugh at his pretention in embracing such intentions.

“Along with Afoninov and his friends, we developed a very ambitious plan which involved the Bulgarians. Our reasoning was straightforward: For a movement of resistance to the war to be efficient, it had to develop on both sides of the front. Otherwise, it would turn into defeat for one side or the other, and the men who refused to fight would be called traitors. What we wanted was first fraternization and then disobedience.”

“They happened in France, too, these truces between soldiers at the front. I've heard about an incident like that one Christmas.”

“Yes, there was fraternizing,” Morlac agreed earnestly. “But, without political foundations, it couldn't go far. That's why we wanted to put pressure on men who had the same revolutionary ideas as us.”

“You had officers, men in command. Did they let you get on with it? Did they have the same ideas as you?”

The prisoner gave a small contemptuous smile.

“We weren't going to take pointless risks and try to rally class enemies to our cause. We only used clandestine methods. Officially, I was going over to the Russians to drink and listen to their music. I had my dog, which was convenient: I told my sergeant that Wilhelm was constantly parked over there because he'd found a girlfriend, which was true. And he gave me permission to go and fetch him.”

“Did the Russians have dogs, too?”

“I don't know where she came from; they may have found her there. Either way, they had a mascot with them, a bitch they called Sabaka. Wilhelm was much bigger than her but he somehow managed to get her in pup. I left before she whelped and I don't know what they ended up looking like.”

Dujeux came into the courtyard and announced that the prisoner's lunch had arrived. They went back to the cell. Realizing the interrogation was to go on a long time, the jailer had set up a small table with two plates and two glasses. The major sat down opposite Morlac and they continued with their discussion while they ate the warm stew that Dujeux had poured from the tin pot delivered to him.

“So this plan, then?”

“It was simple but quite difficult to realize. There was a sector, near Fort Rupel, where the Bulgarian lines and our own were very close. It wasn't like that everywhere. In that mountainous territory we mostly had isolated outposts fairly far apart. With their runners, the Russians knew the Bulgarian units were relieved every ten days. One particular unit had a lot of soldiers committed to the cause. The idea was to wait till they came to the front. Once they were in their trenches there'd be a signal, the Bulgarian troops would kill their officers and we'd come out and fraternize. Supporters all along the front would spread the news and organize the uprising. We'd send proclamations to Salonika and Sofia. Civilian workers would revolt. It would be the end of the war and the beginning of the revolution.”

“Eat,” said Lantier. “It'll get cold.”

Morlac looked at his plate and seemed to take a moment to readjust. He gulped down his stew, keen to get such everyday matters out of the way.

“And what actually happened in the end?”

The prisoner's face darkened. He set down his spoon slowly and tore off some bread to clean his plate.

“It went as planned, to start with.”

There was a pause. Morlac was his gloomy self again and his stubborn expression was back.

“It took nearly three weeks of preparations. I had to find an excuse to go over to the Russian lines when the time for action came. There was some hitch in the rotation of Bulgarian troops. In the end everything fell into place on September 12.”

“I thought that was the day you earned your mention?”

Morlac shrugged without replying. He sat back and ran a fingernail between two side teeth.

“It was beautiful night. It had been a hot day. Everyone felt confident, rested. But there was a lot of tension. The tricky bit was going out into no-man's-land. Unfortunately, there was no moon that night, and you couldn't see much. We'd got the wire cutters ready to cut the barbed wire. Once contact had been made we could light lamps and organize ourselves. The most dangerous bit was the beginning.”

“How many of you were in on it?”

“On the Russian side almost the whole unit. Afoninov had assured me that on the Bulgarian side there were at least two hundred men who'd go for it. On top of that, the timing was good because the officers from that sector had been summoned to headquarters.”

Dujeux came in to clear the plates. He put an apple in front of each of them and left.

“We'd planned the action for four o'clock. That meant we could get things organized before sunrise but we wouldn't be in the dark for too long once both camps were united.”

“What was the signal?”

“
The
Internationale
. They would sing it on the Bulgarian side and we'd join in in chorus. Our positions were so close we could hear everything, especially at night. At four o'clock we heard the hymn wafting over from their lines. You can't imagine the effect it had on us.”

The major thought Morlac's eyes looked watery. In any event, he took out a handkerchief and hid his emotion by blowing into it.

“Then everything happened very quickly. At the time we didn't understand what was going on. It was only afterwards that we put it all together.”

He blew his nose again, noisily this time. And resumed his irritable expression.

“I'll spare you the details. It all started with Wilhelm. He was with me, as usual. He has good eyesight and a hunting dog's instinct. When he realized there was movement in the enemy lines, he climbed onto the parapet and out of the trench. One of the Bulgarians came forward, as planned. But the dog wasn't in on the plan . . . ” Morlac paused to snigger. “He jumped at the man's throat. He'd done it before when we had that skirmish with bayonets, and he'd been praised, hadn't he? To him an enemy was an enemy. He's a good loyal dog.”

Morlac's face was contorting into a hideous grimace.

“Yes, loyal,” he said again.

Lantier was beginning to understand.

“The Bulgarian screamed. And there in the darkness everyone lost their heads. The most committed to the cause could shout as much as they liked that it was meaningless, the others didn't believe them. They thought we'd set a trap for them. Some started shooting. There was some return fire from our lines. People threw up flares. The artillery on our side reacted quickly and sprayed the Bulgarian trenches. I don't need to draw you a diagram . . . ”

“How did you extricate yourselves?”

“Afoninov and I were horrified. At first we held the boys back. But then things took a different turn. It was war again. Every man for himself. Someone gave the signal to attack. The Russians went over the top with me. The Bulgarians had prepared the mutiny carefully: They'd eliminated all the NCOs in the sector. Their lines were a complete shambles and we broke through them without any resistance. It was terrible. We were killing comrades who were just about to join us. A few minutes earlier we'd been prepared to fraternize but now we were in attack mode, we killed everyone we came across.”

“And eventually you were injured?”

“After an hour, or thereabouts. We'd broken through three lines of defense and our artillery hadn't anticipated we'd advance that far. They started using heavy shells and I took some shrapnel in the back of my head. It wasn't deep but it knocked me out. I woke up three days later in Salonika, in the hospital.”

T
hat's how I became a hero.”

To punctuate this conclusion, Morlac took a savage bite of his apple.

“Because of the dog, when it comes down to it,” suggested the major.

The prisoner nodded as he chewed.

“Is that why you hate Wilhelm?”

“I don't hate him anymore,” he said, spitting out a pip. “Okay, when I came round in the hospital, that was another story: When I realized what had happened I felt like killing him. As soon as I could get up I saw him down below, in the courtyard, waiting for me. And for nights on end, till the end of my convalescence, I tried to picture how I could get rid of him.”

Morlac threw the core onto the table.

“But I couldn't do it. First of all, I was stuck in bed. But mostly because I was a hero, you see? Officers had come to bring me my mention signed by Sarrail himself. When General Guillaumat took over from him, he visited the hospital and came into my ward with his staff to congratulate me. Everyone kept talking about my dog. They knew he'd been at the front with me. The nurses fed him in the yard and told me how he was doing. No one would have understood if I'd gotten rid of him with a pistol. But that was what I thought about day and night.”

He sniggered as he talked, wearing the bitter expression that so irritated Lantier.

“I spent the whole winter cooped up, being tended to. But with the first good weather, the doctors thought they were doing me a favor saying I could go out for walks. And those idiotic nurses brought Wilhelm to me to keep me company! They'd even clubbed together to buy him a smart collar. The only consolation I had for having to tolerate him was seeing his face on the end of a leash!”

“But he's a dog, you can't hold it against him . . . ”

“That's what I ended up thinking. It took me nearly six months. It was high summer, I remember it like it was yesterday. We were sitting in the shade of an umbrella pine, him and me. I was looking at his neck, the skin was peeling because he'd been injured too in this whole thing, and it was taking a while to scar. And all of a sudden I felt kind of dizzy. It felt like everything was spinning around me. But it was all going on inside my head: Everything was suddenly falling into place. A massive shake-up in my mind.”

He stood up and walked to the far end of the cell, then spun round fiercely.

“
He
was the hero. That's what I thought, you see. Not just because he followed me to the front and was wounded. No, it was deeper than that, more radical. He had all the good qualities expected of soldiers. He was loyal to the death, brave, merciless toward his enemies. To him, the world's made up of goodies and baddies. There was another way of putting this: He had no humanity. Of course, he was a dog . . . But
we
weren't dogs and they were expecting the same from us. The distinctions, medals, mentions, promotions, all that was designed to reward animal behavior.”

He was now standing facing Lantier but looking beyond him, above him, which, in the confines of this cell, meant staring at the wall.

“On the other hand, the only demonstration of humanity—the one that involved getting enemies to fraternize, to lay down their weapons and force governments to agree to peace—that act was the most reprehensible of all and would have cost us our lives if we'd been found out.”

He waited a moment, calmed himself and went and sat back down.

“When I realized that,” he went on, “I stopped hating Wilhelm. I didn't have any reason to love him either. He'd obeyed his own nature and that wasn't human nature. That was his only excuse. But everyone who sent us off to that massacre had no excuse at all. Anyway, that's when I decided what I would do.”

Lantier had sat in silence through this long explanation. He was profoundly shaken. Deep down, he understood everything Morlac said and agreed with it. And yet, had this prisoner been brought before him for desertion or mutiny, he would have condemned him to death without hesitation.

The prisoner was exhausted by his confession. He sat on the edge of the bed with his arms hanging limply by his sides, and a blank stare on his face. His judge was no more alert than he was, but felt a need to get out of this airless room, to walk about, to put his thoughts into some sort of order. He'd been investigating this case for four days now, and it was time he reached a firm conclusion. After all, he mustn't grant this character and his actions more significance than they actually had.

Lantier was known for his ability to act decisively, even in the most sensitive of cases. This time, though, he couldn't do it. The more he learned about the case, the more his opinion floundered. He wondered briefly whether Morlac was deliberately scrambling his thoughts. But that meant denying the obvious sincerity of his confession.