1914

Two weeks after the expedition had set out was also when Anthime suddenly realized that he never saw Charles anymore. Risking a razzing, he spent two days going up and down the company’s ranks as they tramped along, hoping at least to catch a glimpse of him but succeeding only in exhausting himself even further. Then he started asking around, questioning tight-lipped and supercilious noncoms at first, until a more cooperative sergeant told him one evening that Charles had been transferred, no one knew where, a military secret. Anthime hardly reacted at all, he was so dead on his feet.

In the evenings, moreover, it was often quite a challenge to find a place to sleep where the troop had halted. Since there wasn’t much room for the men in the villages, half the company was usually obliged to try sleeping outdoors; when a village was deserted, the luckiest men camped in abandoned houses, where there might still be a bit of furniture and even sometimes beds, but no bedding. Most of the time, though, they’d fix up sleeping spots in the gardens or out in the fields of beets or oats or in the woods, beneath shelters they constructed from branches or in a providential haystack, and once in an abandoned sugar factory. Wherever they wound up, they never found comfort yet fell asleep fast.

In spite of their fatigue, before turning in for the night they tended to routine chores: laundry duty, inspection of shoes and feet. For distraction and relaxation, some men played cards, dominos, checkers, leapfrog, and even organized high-jump competitions or sack races. Arcenel, however, would simply carve his name with his knife, and Anthime just his initials along with the day’s date, on a tree or a wooden roadside cross. After the evening meal, the men would sleep, then set out again at the bugler’s call after harnessing themselves up, slinging their rifles, musette bags, and canteens over their shoulders, with cartridge pouches at their belts, but only after first hoisting onto their backs the 1893 model knapsacks nicknamed the Ace of Diamonds, made of a square wooden frame covered with a thick envelope of blackboard-green or licorice-brown canvas.[8] The men buckled them on with a pair of shoulder straps, each made of two pieces of leather joined by a brass rivet.

Empty, the pack weighed only one and a third pounds. It quickly grew heavier, however, with a first lot of regulation equipment carefully arranged inside and consisting of alimentary matériel (bottles of strong mint extract, coffee substitute, tins and sachets of sugar and chocolate, water bottles and cutlery of tin-plated iron, pressed iron mug, can opener, penknife), clothing (long and short underpants, cotton handkerchiefs, flannel shirts, suspenders, puttees), cleaning and maintenance products (clothes and shoe brushes, and for the weapons, tins of grease, polish, plus extra laces and buttons, sewing kit with round-tipped scissors), first-aid and toiletry articles (individual bandages, absorbent cotton wool, towel, mirror, soap, razor and strop, shaving brush, toothbrush, comb), as well as personal items (tobacco and rolling papers, matches and tinderbox, flashlight, nickel silver and aluminum bracelet with identification disk, individual service record booklet, and a small Prayer Book for Soldiers).

Though that already seemed quite a load for one knapsack, the men then strapped various accessories to the outside. At the very top, on the rolled-up blanket placed over the tent canvas enclosing poles, stakes, and cords, would sit an individual mess tin, at a slight tilt to the rear so as not to bump the soldier’s head, while at the back of the pack a small bundle of dry wood for cooking supper at the bivouac would be wedged over a stewpot anchored by a strap running up across the mess tin, and from the sides of the pack would hang a few field tools inside their leather covers: ax or shears, billhook, saw, shovel, pick, spade pick, take your pick—along with a collapsible canvas bucket known as the water cow and a lantern in its canvas carrying case. By now this entire edifice would weigh at least seventy-seven pounds, in dry weather. Before sunshine gave way, as it must, to rain.

7

THIS MOSQUITO, at one o’clock, appears in air of a normal end-of-summer blue over the département of the Marne in northeastern France.

Let’s propel ourselves up toward this insect: as we draw closer, it gradually grows into a small plane, a Farman F 37, a two-seater biplane carrying two men, a pilot and an observer sitting one behind the other in crude seats barely protected by two rudimentary windshields. Buffeted by the wind, without the shelter of the closed cockpits that will eventually appear, the pair seem installed upon a narrow panoramic porch from which one can admire the landscape of nascent conflict: columns of trucks and soldiers on the move, cantonments and their parade grounds.