The Train (7 page)

At the front of the train, the fireman, his face and hands
black, was waving his arms about, and a little later we learned that the engineer had been killed by a bullet in the face.

“They’re coming back! They’re coming back!”

The shout ended in a strangled cry. Everybody copied the first ones who had had the idea of throwing themselves flat on their faces in the meadow, at the foot of the embankment.

I did like the others; so did Anna, who was now following me about like a dog without a master.

The planes up in the sky were forming another circle, a little farther west, and this time we missed nothing of the maneuver. We saw one plane come spiraling down, flatten out just when it seemed bound to crash, skim the ground, soar upward again, and sweep around to cover the same ground once more, this time firing its machine gun.

It was two or three miles away. We couldn’t see the target—a village, perhaps, or a road—which was hidden by a wood of fir trees. And already it was climbing into the sky to join the flock waiting for it up there and follow them northward.

I went, like the others, to look at the dead engineer, part of his body on the footplate, near the open firebox, his head and shoulders hanging over the side. There was no face left, just a black and red mass from which the blood was oozing in big drops onto the gray stones by the track.

He was my first dead man of the war. He was almost my first dead man, apart from my father, who had been laid out by the time I came home.

I felt sick and tried not to show it, because Anna was beside me, and because at that moment she took my arm
as naturally as a girl walking along the street with her sweetheart.

I think she was less upset than I was. And yet I myself was less upset than I would have expected. At the sanatorium, where there were a lot of dead people, we were not allowed to see them. The nurses acted in good time, coming to collect a patient from his bed, sometimes in the middle of the night. We knew what that meant.

There was a special room for dying, and another, in the basement, where the body was kept until the relatives claimed it or it was buried in the little local cemetery.

Those deaths were different. There wasn’t the sunshine, the grass, the flowers, the cackling hens, the flies buzzing around our heads.

“We can’t leave him there.”

The men looked at one another. Two of them, both elderly, volunteered to lend the fireman a hand.

I don’t know where they put the engineer. Walking back along the train, I noticed holes in the sides of the cars, long scores which showed the wood as bare as when you fell a tree.

A woman had been wounded, one shoulder, we were told, practically torn off.

It was she whom we could hear groaning as if she were in labor. There were just a few other women around her, old women for the most part, for the men, embarrassed, had moved away in silence.

“It isn’t a pretty sight.”

“What are we going to do? Stay here until they come back to snipe at us?”

I saw an old man sitting on the ground, holding a bloodstained handkerchief to his face. A bottle, hit by a bullet,
had shattered in his hand and splinters of glass had scored his cheeks. He didn’t complain. I could see only his eyes, which were expressing nothing but a sort of amazement.

“They’ve found somebody to attend to her.”

“Who?”

“A midwife on the train.”

I caught sight of her, a sour-faced little old woman with a sturdy figure and her hair arranged in a bun on top of her head. She didn’t belong to our car.

Without realizing, we gathered together in groups corresponding to the carriages, and in front of ours the man with the pipe went on protesting halfheartedly. He was one of the few who had not been to see the dead engineer.

“What the hell are we waiting for? Isn’t there a single bastard here who can make that damned engine work?”

I remember somebody climbing up onto the track carrying a dead chicken by the feet, and sitting down to pluck it. I didn’t try to understand. Seeing that nothing was happening as it did in ordinary life, everything was natural.

“The fireman wants a hefty fellow to feed the boiler while he tries to take the engineer’s place. He thinks he can manage. It isn’t as if the traffic was normal.”

Contrary to all expectations, the horse dealer volunteered, without making a song and dance about it. It seemed to amuse him, like those members of an audience who go up onto the stage in response to an appeal by a conjuror.

He took off his jacket, his tie, and his wristwatch, which he handed over to Julie before making for the engine.

The half-plucked chicken was hanging from a bar in the ceiling. Three of our companions, sweating and out of breath, came back with some bales of straw.

“Make room, you fellows!”

The young fellow of fifteen, for his part, had brought an aluminum saucepan and a frying pan from the abandoned farm.

Were others doing the same in my house?

I can remember some amusing exchanges which made us laugh in spite of ourselves.

“Let’s hope he doesn’t run the train down the embankment.”

“What do you think the rails are for, you idiot?”

“Trains can run off the rails, even in peacetime, can’t they? So which of us two is the idiot?”

A group of people went on fussing around the engine for some time, and it came as a surprise to hear it whistle in the end like an ordinary train. We moved off slowly, almost at a walking pace, without any jolting, before gradually picking up speed.

Ten minutes later we passed a road which crossed the line and which was crowded with carts and cattle, with cars here and there trying to get through. Two or three peasants waved to us, more solemn and serious than we were, and it seemed to me that they looked at us enviously.

Later on, we saw a road which ran parallel with the line for some time, with army trucks driving in both directions and spluttering motorcycles weaving in and out.

I imagine, although I didn’t make sure afterward, that it was the road from Aumagne to Rethel. In any case, we were getting near to Rethel, judging by the increasing number of signals and houses, the sort of houses you find around towns.

“Do you come from Belgium?”

I couldn’t think of anything else to say to Anna, who was sitting beside me on the trunk.

“From Namur. They suddenly decided, in the middle
of the night, to set us free. We’d have had to wait until the morning to get our things, because nobody had the key to the place where they’re locked up. I preferred to run to the station and jump on the first train.”

I didn’t bat an eyelid. Perhaps, in spite of myself, I looked surprised, since she added:

“I was in the women’s prison.”

I didn’t ask what for. It struck me almost as natural. In any case, it was no more extraordinary than for me to be there in a cattle car and my wife and daughter on another train, or to have the driver killed on the footplate and, somewhere else, an old man wounded by a bottle which a machine-gun bullet had shattered in his hand. Everything was natural now.

“Are you from Fumay?”

“Yes.”

“That was your daughter, was it?”

“Yes. My wife is seven and a half months pregnant.”

“You’ll find her at Rethel.”

“Perhaps.”

The others, who had been in the army and were more practical than I was, spread the straw on the floor in readiness for the coming night. It formed a sort of huge communal bed. Some were already lying down on it. The card players kept passing around a bottle of brandy which never left their corner.

We drew into Rethel and there, all of a sudden, for the first time, we became aware that we weren’t ordinary people like the rest, but refugees. I say we, although none of my companions confided in me. All the same I think that in that short space of time we had come to react more or less in the same way.

It was the same sort of weariness, for instance, which could be seen on every face, a weariness very different from that which you feel after a sleepless night or a night’s work.

Perhaps we hadn’t quite reached a state of indifference, but each of us had given up thinking for himself.

Thinking about what, anyway? We knew absolutely nothing. What was happening was beyond us and it was no use thinking or arguing.

For heaven knows how many miles, for instance, I puzzled over the question of the stations. The little stations, the stops, as I have already said, were empty, without even a railwayman to rush out with his whistle and his red flag when the train appeared. On the other hand the bigger stations were packed with people, and police cordons had to be established on the platforms.

I finally hit on an explanation which seems to me to be the right one: namely, that the slow trains had been withdrawn.

The same was true of the roads, the empty ones probably having been closed to traffic for military reasons.

Somebody from Fumay, whom I didn’t know, told me, that very morning, when I was sitting beside Anna, that there was a plan for the evacuation of the town and that he had seen a poster about it at the town hall.

“Special trains have been arranged to take refugees to reception centers in the country where everything is ready to accommodate them.”

That may be true. I didn’t see the poster. I rarely set foot in the town hall, and when we got to the station my wife, Sophie, and I jumped on the first train we saw.

What made me think that my neighbor was right was
that at Rethel nurses, boy scouts, and a whole reception service were waiting for us. There were some stretchers ready, as if somebody already knew what had happened to us, but I learned a little later that our train wasn’t the first to have been machine-gunned on the way.

“And our wives? Our kids?” the man with the pipe started shouting, even before the train had come to a stop.

“Where do you come from?” asked an elderly lady in white, who obviously belonged to the upper class.

“Fumay.”

I counted at least four trains in the station. There were crowds of people in the waiting rooms and behind the barriers, for barriers had been put up as for an official procession. The place was swarming with soldiers and officers.

“Where are the wounded?”

“But what about my wife, dammit?”

“She may have been on the train which has been sent to Rheims.”

“When?”

The more gently the lady in white spoke to him, the more fierce and aggressive he was—on purpose, for he was beginning to feel that he had certain rights.

“About an hour ago.”

“They could have waited for us, couldn’t they?”

Tears came into his eyes, for he was worried in spite of everything and perhaps he wanted to feel unhappy. That didn’t prevent him, a few moments later, from falling on the sandwiches some girls were passing in big baskets from car to car.

“How many can we take?”

“As many as you like. It’s useless hoarding them. You’ll find fresh sandwiches at the next station.”

We were given bowls of hot coffee. A nurse went by asking:

“Nobody sick or wounded?”

Feeding bottles were ready and an ambulance was waiting at the end of the platform. On the next line a train full of Flemings seemed to be on the point of pulling out. They had had their sandwiches and watched us inquisitively as we ate ours.

The Van Straetens are Flemish in origin; they settled at Fumay three generations ago and no longer speak their original language. In the slate-pits, though, they still call my father-in-law the Fleming.

“Take your seats! Watch out for the doors!”

So far they had kept us for hours in stations or sidings. Now they were dealing with us as quickly as possible, as if they were in a hurry to get rid of us.

Because there were too many people on the platform, I couldn’t make out the headlines of the newspapers on the bookstall. I only know that there was one in bold lettering with the word “troops.”

We were moving and a girl wearing an arm band was running alongside the train to distribute her last bars of chocolate. She threw a handful in our direction. I managed to catch one for Anna.

We were going to find similar reception centers at Rheims and elsewhere. The horse dealer had returned to his place in our car after being allowed to wash in the station lavatories, and he was treated as a hero. I heard Julie call him Jeff. He was holding a bottle of Cointreau which he had bought in the refreshment room along with two oranges whose scent spread throughout the car.

It was between Rethel and Rheims, toward the end of
the afternoon, for we were not moving fast, that a countrywoman stood up grumbling:

“I can’t help it. I’m not going to make myself ill.”

Going over to the open door, she put a cardboard box on the floor, squatted down and relieved herself, still muttering between her teeth.

That too was significant. The conventions were giving way—in any case those which had been in force the day before. Today nobody protested at the sight of the horse dealer dozing with his head on Julie’s plump belly.

“You haven’t got a cigarette, have you?” Anna asked me.

“I don’t smoke.”

It had been forbidden in the sanatorium and afterward I hadn’t been tempted to take it up. My neighbor passed her one. I hadn’t any matches on me either, and because of the straw it worried me to see her smoke, although other people had been smoking since the previous day. Perhaps it was a sort of jealousy on my part, a feeling of displeasure which I can’t explain.

We spent a long time in a suburb of Rheims, looking at the backs of the houses, and in the station we were told that our train would be leaving in half an hour.

There was a rush toward the refreshment room, the lavatories, and the inquiry office, where nobody had heard of women, children, and invalids from a train coming from Fumay.

Trains were going through all the time, troop trains, munitions trains, refugee trains, and I still wonder how it was that there weren’t more accidents.

“Perhaps your wife has left a message for you?” Anna suggested.

“Where?”

“Why don’t you ask those ladies?”