1914

Still, on the day after their arrival in the Ardennes, things hadn’t looked that dire. One couldn’t complain about the weather, a trifle cooler than in the Vendée; the air was pure, crisp, and the men felt good, on the whole. Of course they’d been treated to drilling that morning with packs and gear, but this is fairly normal in the army, it’s practically like playing a game. Charles was still keeping some distance between himself and Anthime—and increasingly vice versa—but they had smiled together at Bossis and his jokes, then laughed unkindly when a mean lieutenant made fun of Padioleau’s way of presenting arms during the drill. Afterward, everyone except those who didn’t know how had written a few postcards made more festive by a magical find, an aperitif: Byrrh[7] with a dribble of lemon syrup but not seltzer, unfortunately, only plain water, followed by a lunch that wasn’t so terrible and which they’d even managed to cap with a little nap before going off late that afternoon to buy some plums at a local garden.

It was the day after that when things came into clearer focus: three weeks of almost constant marching. Along roads that grew dusty as the dew dried, the men set out almost every morning at four o’clock, sometimes cutting across fields, never stopping for even a moment. After four or five days, when the weather turned hot and muggy, they were allowed a small respite every half hour from the midpoint of the march on, but men soon began collapsing all the time, especially among the reservists, with Padioleau dropping more often than the others. When they halted for the night, with everybody worn-out, no one wanted to cook so they’d open cans of bully beef without much to wash it down.

For it had dawned on them only too quickly how impossible it was to get wine there, or indeed any beverage except a bit of raw alcohol, on occasion, at a price now increased fivefold by the distillers in the villages through which they passed, where the locals profited greedily from the golden opportunity presented by thirsty troops. This situation would soon change, when headquarters grasped the advantage presented by men properly supplied with drink, since inebriation damped down fear, but things had not yet come to that. Meanwhile and increasingly frequently they still saw a few airplanes passing overhead, it was a distraction, and then the heat began to abate.

Aside from the merchants, however, who also had tobacco, hard sausages, and jams on offer, in the villages but also at the edges of fields along their route small groups of country people gathered to cheer the troops on and surprisingly often, from simple generosity, to give them flowers, fruit, bread, and whatever wine they still had. Sometimes the people of these backwaters had seen the enemy arrive out of nowhere, and sometimes they’d been forced to pay a great deal of money to keep from being bombarded. Trudging along, the soldiers would examine the women gathered by the roadside, noticing some young and pretty ones on occasion. Over toward the town of Écordal, one of them, neither young nor pretty, tossed them some religious medals.

More and more, the men were also passing through certain villages abandoned by their inhabitants or even in ruins, destroyed or burned, perhaps, for not having paid any tribute. The cellars of empty houses had often been looted of everything but the occasional few bottles of Vichy water. The deserted streets were littered with divers damaged articles, and for the most part the troop left them lying there: unused cartridges discarded by a passing company, scattered clothing and linens, pots without handles, empty bottles, a birth certificate, a sick dog, a ten of clubs, a broken shovel.

What also happened was that the situation came into yet clearer focus when rumors began circulating, especially about spying: a traitorous teacher had been surprised, it seemed, in this or that sector, preparing to blow up a bridge. It was even possible, supposedly, that these spies had turned up near Saint-Quentin: two of them had been seen tied to a tree, convicted of having spent the entire night passing information to the enemy via lantern signals, and then as the troop drew closer, they saw the colonel kill them point-blank with his revolver. One evening, as it happened, after they’d been on the march for two weeks, they received orders to blacken their mess tins to reduce their visibility. Unsure how to proceed, Anthime looked at what the others were doing, each in his own way, then coped with a little paste of dirt and boot polish. Yes, it was all definitely becoming clear.