To die is simple enough; only you should have the good taste to die in
some selected spot--unless, of course, you are in China, where the dead
are supreme and exercise almost more authority than the living. But in
our country you have got to die properly, otherwise the living will
look askance at you and say, “What does this corpse want? There’s no
room for it here.”
In 1915 I was going through a kind of probation period at the railway
junction of X., and I went on duty two or three times a week. Going
on duty meant being on the spot and doing small insignificant jobs,
being on guard or making a note of what was passing. Usually the man in
charge used to be found in some gloomy place leading to the lamp-room.
There he endured the long weary hours without interruption, and watched
the military trains passing, full of men who had undergone six months’
campaigning. They sang while they journeyed from one hell to another,
because in war men do not let their thoughts travel far; as soon
as they have got away from the guns they abandon themselves without
restraint to the joy of being alive.
One Saturday night I was lying on a thick mattress which served as a
bed. It was alive with mice. I felt these amiable little beasts at a
finger’s length from my ears, and I listened with wandering attention
to the noises coming from the junction. They were the sounds of a
great railway station: whistles, shrieks, puffing engines, cries of
the winches and the cranes, the vibrations of the taut iron rails,
the sharp clatter of the signals, the repeated clash of the buffers
of colliding trucks; and in the midst of it all, the clamour and the
rhythm of military movements, the swing of a detachment on the march,
the challenges of the sentries, commands, bell-ringings--all those
things which indicate the forcible possession by armed might of the
industrial organism.
My thoughts were running along these lines when I saw Corporal
Bonardent entering my dug-out, blinding me with the flare of his
acetylene lamp.
“Lieutenant!”
“I’m all attention, Bonardent.”
“Some poor devil in the food transport has just got himself done in, on
the semi-permanent way 17. I’m told it’s a dreadful----”
“Let’s go there at once, Corporal!”
Two men were waiting for me outside with a stretcher. It was a glorious
night, upon which the pale and flickering lights of the station hardly
made an impression.
“It’s at La Folie,” said Bonardent: “it’s rather far from here.”
La Folie is a road-crossing, about a mile off. I asked a porter how to
get there, and we started.
What is really amazing, in a large station, is that the organising
imperative will which directs the rush of moving things lies hidden
behind an apparent state of chaos and entanglement. We began to walk
along lines of trucks that never ended. They seemed to have been left
there and forgotten since the beginning of the war--rolling-stock
that appeared to have had its day, with stiffened axles and couplings
devoured by rust; but suddenly our lamp would light up an open door,
and some soldiers were seen in a heap, sleeping on the straw, or there
were cattle with stupefied looks. A few compartments had been turned
into travelling offices, where clerks drudged through a mass of papers
in a light reflected from a drawing-room lamp-shade; one felt that the
terrible grasp of the administration had closed over the railways, just
as its monstrous grip was in possession from the deep-dug trenches to
the outfitting shops far away in the Pyrenees. Sometimes, crossing
wide, dark spaces, we slipped between two trains that seemed petrified
with eternal sleep; but all at once, though no one could be seen, the
trains began to move towards each other, their ends clashing with a
terrific clatter. Farther on we had to stop while hospital trains were
passing. They afforded little comfort then, and there came to us, as
the trains went by, a broadside of heart-rending coughs and puffs
of the saturated chloride air with which the hospitals reeked. In
addition, there were masses of fat mortars lashed on trucks, heaps of
kitchens on wheels, and machinery whose uses one could not possibly
guess, and all sorts of munitions of war, which night made fantastic.
Heavy circular armour protected the cowering engines snorting in the
pale light of the arc lamps. There were also, reminding one of former
times, suburban trains that bore along drowsy passengers and express
trains that swept over the intricate lines swift as a lash of the whip.
In a word, a tumultuous roar, in which military movements clashed with
the routine of civilian life.
At last we arrived at La Folie. It was an inextricable network of
railways, discs, switches and metal cables. Three aged railway workers
were living there in a shed. They were in shirt sleeves, and were
turning the cranks, pulling the switches, directing with an orderly
calm born of experience all the whirling forces which accumulated in
that spot. They made me think of the foremen in past times who used to
carry on when the managing directors were indulging in the pleasures of
social life.
Above the rumbling noises a telegraph bell could be heard patiently
ringing.
“We have come for the A.S.C. man,” said Bonardent.
“Oh! for that poor devil. He is there, under the sack and all around.
My God!”
We entered the zone occupied by the corpse. I say “zone” deliberately,
for the poor wretch had been cut up and scattered like a handful of
grain at seed-time.
“God in Heaven!” said a railwayman with white hair; “why did the poor
man come off the truck without looking round first? He made a terrible
mistake. Here there is too much traffic for anyone to leave one’s post.”
The face of the dead man was intact, but sixty trucks had passed over
his body, splitting it diagonally from the feet to the shoulders. We
picked up, in one place and another, the remains--bleeding pieces of
flesh, intestines, and, as I well remember, a hand clutching a piece
of cheese. Death had struck the man as he was eating.
The extraordinary thing was that his overcoat remained whole: it
concealed from view the hideous annihilation of the body. Lifting it
slightly, I saw his discipline book, on which one could decipher the
name Lamailleux.
“I think,” I said, “we’ve got him all now.”
An electric lamp, perched high up, gave a fitful light and seemed to be
suffering from irritating twitches.
I decided that we should take a short cut back across “The
Artillery”--a huge siding where munition trains had been shunted. But,
as we got near the railways, a sentry appeared:
“Halt! Who goes there?”
None of us had thought of the password. The territorial barred the way
with his rifle. He was adamant:
“I am sorry, Lieutenant, but you must go another way: those are my
orders.”
A long turning brought us before another sentry.
“The password, please! You can’t go through ‘The Artillery’ without it.”
“My friend, we are taking away a dead body.”
I raised the corner of the sacking and uncovered the bluish face.
In the light of the acetylene a portion of the pale skin with some
tattooed marks could be seen through the chaotic heap of clothes that
were saturated with blood. A look of horror passed over the guard’s
face, but he said again:
“Lieutenant, go along the main line! It’s not possible this way.”
We plunged back again along the network of rails, disturbed by the
clatter of the signals and the rumbling convoys. Sometimes the
exhausted stretcher-bearers stopped and placed their burden on the
stony embankment and carefully spat on their hands. Trains went by,
and we could see, in the bright compartments, women reading, tightly
clasping beautiful children who had fallen asleep.
At last the station lights came into view.
“Where are we taking the corpse?” I asked Bonardent.
“I don’t know, sir.”
I finally decided to present myself at the _Petite Vitesse_. A room
there had been taken to receive the wreckage cast off from the swirling
activity of the railway station--lost trunks, unemployed men, riderless
beasts, stores with no destination, and, when necessary, corpses. A
gendarme was smoking a cigarette in front of the door.
“Lieutenant, there’s no room here to-day. It’s full of fugitives from
the north, with their kids and packages.”
I uttered a few words of encouragement to my men, and made up my mind
to try the “draft-pavilion.” It was occupied by detachments that were
rejoining their corps. The men were sleeping in heaps on the straw.
“Oh! you must see it’s quite impossible to put it here with the men,”
said an adjutant, shaking his head. He added, as if to excuse himself:
“Put yourself in my place, Lieutenant. I have no authority.... I can’t
take charge of a corpse without orders....”
I sat down on a stone. The stretcher-bearers, worn out, mopped their
brows and uttered the word “Drink!” I looked at the shapeless mass of
Lamailleux, which seemed quite indifferent to this last cross it had to
bear, and it waited for its eternal resting-place with the sovereign
patience of death.
“I don’t suppose you are well acquainted with the station,” said the
Adjutant to me; “but there’s a guard-room there for the transport men
stationed here. I’ll go and see.”
I let him go and began to smoke, contemplating the night, which was
warm and glorious. The tranquillity of the objects seemed, like the
agitation of the men, to say distinctly: “Why is this man upsetting
us all with this useless corpse?” And an insect, ecstatic in the rare
grass, emitted a sharpening crescendo of sound like a little being who
imagines that the whole earth exists and was made for him.
The Adjutant emerged from the darkness.
“It’s most unfortunate. A man is locked up there for drunkenness: he
has been sick all over the place.”
“Well, all right! Let’s go and see the station-master.”
He was asleep. His deputy was reading the illustrated papers. While
I stated my case he asked me to advise him what pictures he should
cut out to stick on the walls from among the little women of the _Vie
fantaisiste_, of which he seemed to be an inveterate reader. As I
remained surly, he said, as if in parenthesis:
“As for this dreadful business, it is an awful pity that the hospital
is at the other end of the town. You can’t go there at this time of
night. Put the thing in a truck until to-morrow morning, old chap!”
Having, by this wonderful suggestion, relieved himself of all
responsibility, the young man stuck his nose again into the illustrated
paper.
At that time they had not erected at the railway stations those large
hospitals of wood and cardboard which are to be seen everywhere
now. The idea of the truck I did not entertain for two seconds. In
imagination I saw this improvised mortuary starting out during the
night and taking away the corpse. It was a mad idea!
I went to the postmen: they were sorting out the letters. They were
humming: “It is I who am Nénesse.” There wasn’t room for a rat in their
hutch, and at once they regarded the question as quite beyond their
jurisdiction....
I came out overcome with a kind of annoyance. Really, nobody took the
slightest interest in my dead man. I muttered to myself: “Why, why,
Lamailleux, did you let yourself die in a place where corpses are
not wanted, and at a moment when no one has time to deal with them?”
But even as I said that, I felt none the less a kind of link being
established between me and this wreckage, and I looked at it as at
something which puzzles you, but which belongs to you in spite of
everything.
“Where shall we put the poor man?” said Bonardent.
Then the simplest solution struck me.
“Follow me,” I said.
Quietly we went back towards the lamp-room.
“There’s no room there, Lieutenant.”
“Proceed, Corporal.”