THE WALLS
At daybreak there was a stop, and they said to us, "You're there."
We got out, yawning, our teeth chattering, and grimy with night, on to
a platform black-smudged by drizzling rain, in the middle of a sheet of
mist which was torn by blasts of distant whistling. Disinterred from
the carriages, our shadows heaped themselves there and waited, like
bales of goods in the dawn's winter.
Adjutant Marcassin, who had gone in quest of instructions, returned at
last. "It's that way."
He formed us in fours. "Forward! Straighten up! Keep step! Look as
if you had something about you."
The rhythm of the step pulled at our feet and dovetailed us together.
The adjutant marched apart along the little column. Questioned by one
of us who knew him intimately, he made no reply. From time to time he
threw a quick glance, like the flick of a whip, to make sure that we
were in step.
I thought I was going again to the old barracks, where I did my term of
service, but I had a sadder disappointment than was reasonable. Across
some land where building was going on, deeply trenched, beplastered and
soiled with white, we arrived at a new barracks, sinisterly white in a
velvet pall of fog. In front of the freshly painted gate there was
already a crowd of men like us, clothed in subdued civilian hues in the
coppered dust of the first rays of day.
They made us sit on forms round the guard room. We waited there all
the day. As the scorching sun went round it forced us to change our
places several times. We ate with our knees for tables, and as I undid
the little parcels that Marie had made, it seemed to me that I was
touching her hands. When the evening had fallen, a passing officer
noticed us, made inquiries, and we were mustered. We plunged into the
night of the building. Our feet stumbled and climbed helter-skelter,
between pitched walls up the steps of a damp staircase, which smelt of
stale tobacco and gas-tar, like all barracks. They led us into a dark
corridor, pierced by little pale blue windows, where draughts came and
went violently, a corridor spotted at each end by naked gas-jets, their
flames buffeted and snarling.
A lighted doorway was stoppered by a throng--the store-room. I ended
by getting in in my turn, thanks to the pressure of the compact file
which followed me, and pushed me like a spiral spring. Some barrack
sergeants were exerting themselves authoritatively among piles of
new-smelling clothes, of caps and glittering equipment. Geared into
the jerky hustle from which we detached ourselves one by one, I made
the tour of the place, and came out of it wearing red trousers and
carrying my civilian clothes, and a blue coat on my arm; and not daring
to put on either my hat or the military cap that I held in my hand.
We have dressed ourselves all alike. I look at the others since I
cannot look at myself, and thus I see myself dimly. Gloomily we eat
stew, by the miserable illumination of a candle, in the dull desert of
the mess room. Then, our mess-tins cleaned, we go down to the great
yard, gray and stagnant. Just as we pour out into it, there is the
clash of a closing gate and a tightened chain. An armed sentry goes up
and down before the gate. It is forbidden to go out under pain of
court-martial. To westward, beyond some indistinct land, we see the
buried station, reddening and smoking like a factory, and sending out
rusty flashes. On the other side is the trench of a street; and in its
extended hollow are the bright points of some windows and the radiance
of a shop. With my face between the bars of the gate, I look on this
reflection of the other life; then I go back to the black staircase,
the corridor and the dormitory, I who am something and yet am nothing,
like a drop of water in a river.
* * * * * *
We stretch ourselves on straw, in thin blankets. I go to sleep with my
head on the bundle of my civilian clothes. In the morning I find
myself again and throw off a long dream--all at once impenetrable.
My neighbor, sitting on his straw with his hair over his nose, is
occupied in scratching his feet. He yawns into tears, and says to me,
"I've dreamt about myself."
* * * * * *
Several days followed each other. We remained imprisoned in the
barracks, in ignorance. The only events were those related by the
newspapers which were handed to us through the gates in the morning.
The war got on very slowly; it immobilized itself, and we--we did
nothing, between the roll-calls, the parades, and from time to time
some cleaning fatigues. We could not go into the town, and we waited
for the evening--standing, sitting, strolling in the mess room (which
never seemed empty, so strong was the smell that filled it), wandering
about the dark stairs and the corridors dark as iron, or in the yard,
or as far as the gates, or the kitchens, which last were at the rear of
the buildings, and smelt in turns throughout the day of coffee-grounds
and grease.
We said that perhaps, undoubtedly indeed, we should stay there till the
end of the war. We moped. When we went to bed we were tired with
standing still, or with walking too slowly. We should have liked to go
to the front.
Marcassin, housed in the company office, was never far away, and kept
an eye on us in silence. One day I was sharply rebuked by him for
having turned the water on in the lavatory at a time other than
placarded. Detected, I had to stand before him at attention. He asked
me in coarse language if I knew how to read, talked of punishment, and
added, "Don't do it again!" This tirade, perhaps justified on the
whole, but tactlessly uttered by the quondam Pétrolus, humiliated me
deeply and left me gloomy all the day. Some other incidents showed me
that I no longer belonged to myself.
* * * * * *
One day, after morning parade, when the company was breaking off, a
Parisian of our section went up to Marcassin and asked him, "Adjutant,
we should like to know if we are going away."
The officer took it in bad part. "To know? Always wanting to know!"
he cried; "it's a disease in France, this wanting to know. Get it well
into your heads that you _won't_ know! We shall do the knowing for
you! Words are done with. There's something else beginning, and
that's discipline and silence."
The zeal we had felt for going to the front cooled off in a few days.
One or two well-defined cases of shirking were infectious, and you
heard this refrain again and again: "As long as the others are
dodging, I should be an ass not to do it, too."
But there was quite a multitude who never said anything.
At last a reinforcement draft was posted; old and young
promiscuously--a list worked out in the office amidst a seesaw of
intrigue. Protests were raised, and fell back again into the
tranquillity of the depot.
I abode there forty-five days. Towards the middle of September, we
were allowed to go out after the evening meal and Sundays as well. We
used to go in the evening to the Town Hall to read the despatches
posted there; they were as uniform and monotonous as rain. Then a
friend and I would go to the café, keeping step, our arms similarly
swinging, exchanging some words, idle, and vaguely divided into two
men. Or we went into it in a body, which isolated me. The saloon of
the café enclosed the same odors as Fontan's; and while I stayed there,
sunk in the soft seat, my boots grating on the tiled floor, my eye on
the white marble, it was like a strip of a long dream of the past, a
scanty memory that clothed me. There I used to write to Marie, and
there I read again the letters I received from her, in which she said,
"Nothing has changed since you were away."
One Sunday, when I was beached on a seat in the square and weeping with
yawns under the empty sky, I saw a young woman go by. By reason of
some resemblance in outline, I thought of a woman who had loved me. I
recalled the period when life was life, and that beautiful caressing
body of once-on-a-time. It seemed to me that I held her in my arms, so
close that I felt her breath, like velvet, on my face.
We got a glimpse of the captain at one review. Once there was talk of
a new draft for the front, but it was a false rumor. Then we said,
"There'll never be any war for us," and that was a relief.
My name flashed to my eyes in a departure list posted on the wall. My
name was read out at morning parade, and it seemed to me that it was
the only one they read. I had no time to get ready. In the evening of
the next day our detachment passed out of the barracks by the little
gate.