Part 4

“Excuse me, sir, for having made you consider things which must seem strange to a man with your point of view. I do not regret having taken this opportunity to speak to you about Dauche. He hasn’t, I believe, any near relations in uninvaded territory. You are interested in him, and I must warn you: he is lost. I’m going to add, since you seek his friendship, that at any moment something will happen to him, bringing death rapidly in its train.”

I had only known Dauche for a short time, but I was overwhelmed. Some meaningless words came to my lips. I said something like “How terrible!” But the doctor, with a pale smile, ended by saying:

“Alas! sir, you will do as I and many others have done: you will get used to living in the presence of men who yet share our world, but of whom one knows without a shadow of doubt that they are already dead.”

* * * * *

I could not get accustomed to such a thing. The conversation had taken place towards noon. I spent the rest of the day in avoiding the sight of Dauche--cowardly conduct which found justification in my inability to conceal my thoughts.

Night found me deprived of sleep, but it was doubly useful: it gave me time to get the better of certain impressions, and enabled me to plead sickness for my changed disposition.

As I was getting out of bed, Dauche suggested that we should both go for a walk in the woods. I was on the point of refusing; but his smile was so affectionate and engaging that I hadn’t the courage to pretend illness. Besides, the weather was radiant.

The brilliant sunshine in which some vigour still remained, the delicate tints of a landscape rich in the mists of early morning, and perhaps a healthy desire to be cheerful and forget--all that suddenly led my thoughts away from the depths into which they had sunk.

Dauche began running amid the tall grass, which was slowly fading to a pale amber. His laughter, you would have said, was that of a boy. Recounting all kinds of anecdotes and sayings, he played the games loved by his own children, and sometimes he used to stop suddenly and speak with respect and affection of the child he did not yet know, and of the mother who waited for him in exile.

No natural thing seemed too trifling or unworthy of attention: he delighted in the scent of the flowers, spared a momentary glance for every object, rubbed the fragrant herbs between his fingers, and tasted the blackberries and hazel nuts from the thickets.

He made me notice a thousand things whose existence until then, I blush to think, I was scarcely aware of. He dragged me after him through an endless series of adventures, and I could only follow him, awkwardly and grumbling, like an old man forced to dance a _ronde_.

We were returning to the Château, congratulating ourselves on our appetite and on the good time that we had had, when, in the bend of a path, the words and the warning of the doctor burst with a shock upon my consciousness. It was like a sharp imperious rap of the knuckle against a door. I was aware then that I had never ceased thinking of it in my subconsciousness. But looking once again at Dauche, sturdy and blond like an ear of corn in the splendour of noon, I shook my head, saying decidedly, “This worthy doctor is mistaken.”

And, during the whole of that day, I remained happy.

The next day, as I took a long time getting up, and, musing idly, counted the gay flowers on the curtains, I caught, not far from me, the regular breathing of Dauche, who was still sleeping. Immediately a voice whispered in my ear, “That man is going to die.”

I turned over on my other side, and the voice repeated, “That man over there is a dead man.”

Then I was seized with a desire to go away,--far away from Dauche and from the Château, and to bury myself in the noise and activity of civilian France.

I was completely awake, and began to reason the matter out with cold deliberation.

“After all, I’ve known this man for so short a time and can do nothing to help him. He has been in the hands of skilled surgeons who have exhausted all the resources of their art for him.... I would forget his terrible fate, as I had every right to in view of the fact that it was shared by a large number of young men equally worthy of attention. My presence could be of no use to him, and to be with him must indeed often draw upon those reserves of moral energy of which I was strongly in need.”

These arguments ended in my asking the doctor, when I found myself alone with him that same morning on some pretext or other, to hasten my removal to another hospital.

“From the present state of your wound,” he said to me, “I see no objection to it. I’ll see the thing is done.”

This ready assent, though so gratifying, caused me some surprise. But my eye meeting the doctor’s, I found him looking so sad and perplexed that I was ashamed.

I was, indeed, so upset by my weakness that at the end of a quarter of an hour I went again to the doctor and asked if it wasn’t possible for me to change my mind, and to remain at the Château de S---- until I had completely recovered.

He smiled with a queer satisfied expression and assured me I could stay as long as I liked.

My decision, arrived at after so much delay and evasion, brought calm to my mind. I passed most of the day in my room and found diversion in reading. Towards evening a soldier from a regiment stationed near us, taking French leave, came to see us and invited us to hear two musicians of his regiment who were giving a concert in an orange garden.

Though I had no precise intellectual understanding of music, I highly appreciated it. And at that time I was, surely, in a position to remark how a succession of notes and chords can interpret one’s prevailing mood and quicken its emotions.

A violin sonata of Bach was being played with piano accompaniment. Several times I felt as if an invisible and unknown person touched me on the arm and whispered, “How can you forget he is going to die?”

I got up as soon as the concert ended and went quickly away, suffering veritable torture.

“What is the matter?” asked Dauche, running after me. “You seem ill or unhappy.”

“Both,” I replied, in a voice I could no longer control. “Didn’t you hear the music of the violin?”

“Yes,” he said musingly; “it was pure joy.”

I looked at him furtively and withdrew nothing. But that evening, alone with my thoughts in the dark, I understood that chance had reserved for me a strange rôle to play in the fate of my friend--Dauche was doomed: he had to die: he was about to die; but some one else, in some kind of way, had to suffer his death-agony....

* * * * *

I am not, I protest, different from other people. The war had severely tried me, but my imagination remained unclouded, and my wound was not of such a kind as to impair the normal working of a healthy average brain.

I am, therefore, thoroughly persuaded that the tense experience I was to undergo, from that day, would have equally afflicted any man confronted with the same calamitous circumstances.

In spite of the sinister life of the battlefield, I was to be in the presence of a form of death new and terrible in its duration. It is hardly possible to live without at every moment visualising what is going to happen at the next; and it was tragic to bear in one’s consciousness a certainty which froze, at birth, every plan and intention. Illness creates, in ordinary life, like conditions; but their misery is tempered by hope, or even by the relief which comes from resignation. On account of the war I was to undergo an agonising experience that was unique, and to live by the side of a man to whom I knew the frightful day of reckoning would suddenly come, and who had no future except that which existed in hope and ignorance.

This ignorance of ourselves is extremely precious, and makes us envy that sovereign ignorance of the beasts and plants. It enabled Dauche to live cheerfully on the edge of the abyss. I was there to assume the burden of the tragedy, as if it were alien to the human rightness of things that so much suffering should take place without a conscious victim.

The first days of November had come. Autumn was growing less resplendent. We had not given up our walks. I was forced to continue them in spite of myself, for dying Nature seemed to be giving intense expression to our tragic friendship.

We often climbed the hill which looked over the plain of Rheims. Military life seemed, like the sap of the plants, to be getting stiff and cold and withdrawing into the earth. The armies were preparing for their winter sleep. The guns boomed wearily and without vigour. The bareness of the trees revealed the signs of war which during summer were hidden beneath the foliage.

Autumn made me feel more acutely the fate that was to strike down my friend, and Dauche himself made me realise with a cruel relentlessness the fate of all men. The thought that this man was going to die weighed so much on my mind that I was left without courage, weak and useless. And, in fact, it was the helplessness of man which seemed to me to be solely evident as I gazed at the curtain of poplar trees lit up with an elusive glory.

Then I was powerless before the terrible thought which haunted me: “He will never see all this again.”

There is in the memoirs of Saint-Simon a frightful page on the death of Louis XIV. The historian cannot describe any of the gestures of the dying monarch without repeating, with a persistence inspired by hate: “And it was for the last time.”

In the same way I constantly thought, when I saw my friend admiring the beauty of autumn: “It’s for the last time....” But my thoughts, on the contrary, were full of pain and compassion.

After long hours at our outpost on the hill, we used to make up our minds to return when the light of the rockets began to adorn the twilight with pale constellations.

Dauche appeared calm, cheerful, almost happy, as if he were having continual glimpses of hope.

He used to make plans: that was unendurable, and I felt so irritated that I once said:

“How happy you must be to dare to make plans at such a time as this!”

The phrase was quite vague and general; but as soon as it was uttered it appeared to me cruel and malevolent. I was trying to think how to re-say it when Dauche replied:

“As long as your heart beats isn’t that an adventure in itself? And, besides, you must defy the future if you are not to fear it.”

These words, so full of wisdom, perplexed me without affording me any comfort. They only gave rise to another cause for anxiety. Did Dauche have any inkling of his position?

My mind was at that time so acutely affected by the secret that haunted me that, for several days, the question tortured me.

To-day, when the lapse of time enables me to look at things with the necessary perspective, I can state that Dauche was unaware of the calamity awaiting him. In fact, I never saw anything which made me suppose he ever felt a twinge of uneasiness. I cannot recall any word, allusion or weakness which, had he been aware, would not have failed to escape him and reveal to me the depths of his consciousness.

But on one occasion I was again assailed by doubt. A fellow-soldier in my regiment, rescued by the Red Cross, lay dying, fatally wounded in one of these numerous little scraps which have made Hill 108 the open wound of our sector. We went to see him on his death-bed, and at once I hastened to get Dauche away from the room, in which he was inclined to linger.

“He is, after all, better so,” I remarked, to break a painful silence.

“D’you think so? Do you really think so?” the young man replied.

A mysterious impulse, which was not mere chance, made us look into one another’s eyes; and in those of my friend, usually so clear, I was aware of something that quivered, elusive, frantic, like a wreck of a ship lost in the desolate wastes of the sea.

I endeavoured to change the conversation, and I succeeded. Dauche turned back towards life, breathing deeply, and soon breaking into shouts of laughter, in which I joined quite genuinely.

In spite of this alarming incident, I had to recognise that Dauche suspected nothing. What I saw in his eyes that day I would have, without a doubt, surprised in every human look. Moreover, the flesh is aware of things of which the mind is not, and the sharp anguish behind that look was perhaps like one of those mute cries of the animal, which are uttered without the inspiration or recognition of consciousness.

* * * * *

Dauche’s wound was now healed over. Mine required very little attention. There was no difficulty about my recovery. I was waiting for something else. I understood that perfectly when one day Dauche asked me why I remained so long in the fighting zone. I hit upon a reply in which I pleaded our great friendship and that I had few attachments within the country. But when I faced the question myself I saw quite well what was the real motive of my stay at S----. Always I was waiting for that something to happen.

In spite of these moods, the affection I had for Dauche continued to grow. It had deepened with my pity, and the certainty that death would shortly claim him contributed not a little to exalt it. I was by nature inclined to be emotional, and I became passionately devoted to him. I experienced all the apprehensions of a woman who tends a sick child, and is filled with despair on the slightest symptoms or movements.

There was in the park a tennis court, on which a few worm-eaten wickets were lying. Dauche hit them often with some worn bowls which the moisture was fast rotting. One morning, as he was throwing one of these bowls, it crumbled into pieces between his fingers, causing him to turn and stumble. At once he raised his hand to his brow, and I thought he staggered. Already I was upon him, and I caught him in my arms.

“What is the matter with you?” he said, seeing my discomposed features.

“I thought your head was giving you pain.”

“No,” he replied smiling; “not at all. I was readjusting my bandages.”

Another time, when I dropped a book I was running through very abstractedly, he bent down, with his usual alacrity, to pick it up. I thought he was slow in rising again, as if he was trying to master an attack of giddiness. Leaning forward, I at once took the book from his hands. His eyes were veiled with a thin reddish film. Perhaps I imagined that, for it did not last a moment.

“I forbid you,” I said, making a painful effort to be jocular--“I forbid you to play any other part than that of a convalescent.”

He looked at me, amazed, and asked:

“Do you want me to believe that I am ill?”

This reply showed me how tactless I had been, and I saw that I must carefully take myself in hand if I were to hide the anxiety which obsessed me.

Henceforth I was never free from it. I noticed everything my friend ate or drank, not daring to advise him, and itching sometimes to do so.

I got clear away by myself and read in secret some medical treatise which tended rather to lead me astray than instruct me. I made a thousand resolutions and plans and rejected them in turn. They would all have been ridiculous, or even comic, if death had not been at hand, sacred and solemn.

That night I awoke startled several times, and I listened to the breathing of my companion, convinced, with the slightest pause, the slightest change in the rhythm, that he was dying--that he was dead.

We had not given up our walks, but I had abruptly shortened them, without saying why. I discovered a thousand round-about ways in order to avoid a rocky or slippery road; I pushed aside the branches that grew across the paths with a care that could not fail to arouse suspicion. Sometimes, in the course of a little excursion, feeling that we had gone far from the village, I suddenly experienced an overpowering terror which made me silent and stupid.

I had given up chess, excusing myself on the ground of fatigue, which soon indeed was no longer feigned. A time came when all these emotions seriously affected my health. I kept my bed for several days without being at all rested. I would rather have been left to myself absolutely; but the thought of Dauche going out alone and not able to take care of himself was unendurable. I could not imagine that the fatality was to take place without my being present, because I was always expectant, waiting....

So he always stayed with me, and used to pass the time by reading out to me. I often wished to stop him and, being unable to say that I felt anxious on his account, I complained of my head. The thing is unbelievable. It was I who looked like the man who was doomed, and it was he who seemed to be in full possession of his strength. I was right in what I said: I was undergoing on his behalf the pangs of death.

One night, during his first sleep, he uttered a kind of moan so strangely animal in quality, that at once I was on my feet, and I gazed at him for a long time in the glow of the night-light.

The emotion I felt that night was mingled with something like an intense desire for freedom. I was horrified to discover that my sick soul not only waited for the inevitable thing, but was dominated by a longing for the end.

* * * * *

I got up about the beginning of December, and our first walk was in the pinewoods that clustered on the sandy hills south of the main road from Rheims to Soissons.

The afternoon was coming to a close. A wild west wind raged through this war-scarred valley which, from ancient times, had borne the ravaging ebb and flow of invasion.

We were walking side by side, feeling rather chilled and silent, given up to those formless thoughts that find no expression in the spoken word and which are of the very colour and fabric of the soul.

We got rather warm in climbing a hill, and when we got to the top I suggested we should sit and rest ourselves on the trunk of a beech tree that lay mutilated on the ground, and from which oozed a yellow liquid streaked with purple.

I was worn out, without hope, without courage, having lost all interest in my doings, in the condition of a man whose will fails him and who gives up the agonising struggle.

Is it possible that there can be, between two beings, relations so mysteriously intimate? Is it true that it was I who on that day gave up the struggle?

Overwhelmed with misery, I stood up quite involuntarily, and, with unseeing eyes, I gazed towards the horizon at the leaping flight of hills bristling with trees.

Was it really a queer noise that made me turn round? Wasn’t it rather a shock or a lacerating sensation taking place within me? The fact is that, all of a sudden, I knew that behind me something was happening. And then my heart began to beat violently, for it could only be the thing--the frightful and expected thing....

It was!

Dauche had slipped from the tree-trunk. It was some time before I recognised him; his whole body was shaken by convulsions--hideous, inhuman, like an animal struck down by the butcher’s mallet. His feet and his hands were contracted and twitching. His face was purple and forced round towards the right shoulder. He foamed at the mouth and showed his white eyeballs.

I feel a kind of shame in describing this scene. I had often been in the presence of death, and the war had made me live in horrible intimacy with it; but I had never seen anything so frightful and so bestial. I, in my turn, began to tremble, as if the shiver of the victim was contagious, and my feeling of despair and nausea grew more intense.

That lasted for an eternity of time, during which I never moved. I let death do its work and I waited until it had finished. Gradually, however, I became aware of a lull, and the grip on the victim seemed to relax.

Dauche’s body remained rigid, inert. A feeble moan escaped his lips.

At the same moment I recovered from my stupor and, in spite of my paralysed will, I set about removing from this place what had once been my friend.

In raising him from the ground I suffered terrible pain. His muscles were contracted and he was terribly heavy. I caught hold of him with my arms round his body and carried him with his breast on mine, like a sleeping child. A thin stream of frothy saliva oozed from the corners of his mouth, as from the snouts of cattle in harness. His head began to sway heavily.

Night was falling. I had to put my burden down every few yards, then take it up again.

My wound caused me acute suffering, but my mind was benumbed and my movements almost involuntary.

I do not know how I came within sight of the Château. On reaching the foot of the hill, suddenly, in the bend of an avenue, I met the doctor, who had been taking a solitary walk. It was almost dark; I did not see the expression on his face.

I placed the body on the ground, kneeled down beside it, my face streaming with perspiration, and said, “Here he is.” Then I began to weep.

There were cries, shouts and lights. They carried away Dauche’s body, and I was carried too.

* * * * *

It was really two days later that Dauche died. I did not wish to see him again. I had been placed in a room far removed from him, where I lived in a kind of semi-delirium, asking from hour to hour, “Has the end come? Has it ended?”

But I knew when the end came before I was told, and I let myself fall into a dark dreamless sleep, of which I still retain the most despairing impression.

It appears that Dauche was buried in the little cemetery skirted by the birch and dead fir trees that are to be seen at the village of C.... in an arid field of white sand. I never could get myself to visit him there. But I carried away with me a more sombre grave that time will not efface.

I left the Château de S---- towards the middle of December. I was weak and enfeebled, weary with the thought that it was now my own life I must live, and undergo for myself the struggle of my own life and death.

COUSIN’S PROJECTS

Whenever I had a minute to spare I went and sat at the foot of Cousin’s bed. He said to me:

“See, there’s room for you now that they’ve cut my legs off. One would think they’d done it on purpose.”

This man of forty had a young and delicate face. On “shaving days,” when the razor had done its work, it did one good to see the everlasting, trustful smile of Cousin. It was a wonderful smile--rather delicate, rather ironical, rather candid, rather convulsive; the very smile of the race, made with lips discoloured by the loss of blood, and features drawn by long and weary effort. In spite of everything, Cousin had a confiding look--the air of one who trusted absolutely the whole world, and especially himself, because he lived, because he was Cousin.

One leg remained to him which, to speak frankly, was worth nothing at all. The joint of the knee had been smashed by the explosion of a torpedo. It was a bad business, of which people spoke in low voices, shaking their heads.

But, what matter? Cousin did not put his trust in his legs. Already he had abandoned one; he did not seem to care much about a leg more or less. Cousin, I think, did not put his trust in any particular part of his chest, or his head, or his limbs. With or without legs, he was himself, and in his clear green eyes burnt a generous flame that was the expression of a pure soul.

Whilst I was sitting on his bed Cousin told me all about himself. He always took up the thread of events at the point where the war had broken it off, and he had a natural inclination to unite the happy past of Peace to a future not less delicious. Across the troubled and bloody abyss he loved to stretch the life of yesterday until it touched the life of to-morrow. Never a verb in the past tense, but an eternal and miraculous present.