Gabriel Chevallier - Fear

While we were being carried across the tracks and platforms, civilians looked at us with pity, and murmured: ‘Poor children!’ Their pity made me suddenly feel that my wound had a meaning, one revived from antiquity: ‘Your blood has flowed for the country, and you are a hero!’ But I knew just how hesitant and unwilling a hero I was, and that in fact I was a mere victim, or beneficiary, of a blow that had struck home, that I had not raised my arm to avenge it, that no enemy was dead because of anything I had done. I had no exploits to recount to all the zealous mothers and old men gathered on the ramparts to greet the returning warriors after their victorious battles. I was a hero without enemy scalps, taking advantage of the heroism of homicidal heroes. It could be that I felt just a little ashamed…

It was when we were brought into a great hall full of nurses in white, some of them young, smiling and fresh-faced, others grey and maternal, that we learned how special we were. Women! To be surrounded by the faces and voices and smiles of women! So we were not going to end up in some sinister military hospital…

We were assigned our beds. I was in ward 11, on the third floor, under the supervision of the matron, Miss Nancey. Each ward had its staff and head nurse; the hospital had twelve wards and must have held two or three hundred patients.

It was six days since I was wounded and this was the first time I had left the hard stretcher on which I couldn’t turn round. My new bed felt infinitely soft, and to find myself in a bright, clean place, in white sheets, made me strangely astonished. Now I was certain of my salvation, I could at last let go, relinquish all the strength I’d summoned up to keep myself safe and sound while I was being transported by indifferent stretcher-bearers who had grown deaf to our screams having heard too many screams already, and who could only get the rest and calm which they also needed by abandoning us to our pain, forgetting us, sometimes letting us die. I gave in to the weakness that came so easily and closed my eyes, as a young nurse took charge of me.

I had not washed since we were in the trenches before the attacks of 25 September. Underneath its coating of bandages, my body was covered in filth and dried blood from top to toe, and there were still pallid lice crawling around beneath the gauze, lice which you could burst like fat pimples in one vile squelch with your fingernail. The young woman propped me up on my pillows, put a basin on my bed and wiped my face. I was transformed. From the haggard mask scarred by horror and exhaustion that I had acquired through three weeks of combat emerged my real face, my old one, the face of man destined to live. She considered this new face that she had just cleaned, now pink but still dazed, and asked me:

‘What class are you in?’

‘Class 15.’

‘What were you doing before the war?’

‘Student.’

‘Ah! Two of my brothers were students.’

She washed my right hand (the left was still swathed in dressings), holding it in hers like you do with little children. The water in the basin was black and mucky. It was thick with the mud of Artois, the clay into which we were driven by the whistle of shells and which had plastered us with hard scales.

I thought she had finished with me but she came back, accompanied by a small, brusque woman who told me:

‘We will move you near the windows.’

‘I’m fine here,’ I answered weakly, wanting nothing but sleep.

‘No, you’ll be better there, take my word for it.’

And without further ado she summoned the porters. I glared at her, I found her unpleasant. However, this turned out to be the first of Mademoiselle Nancey’s kind deeds. From then on this was to be my bed, second in the row by the windows looking on to the hospital’s main quadrangle, near the door, which I was soon convinced was a very good position. And I owed it to my social status, of which the young woman had immediately informed the head nurse.

I could sleep.

The next morning.

‘It’s not bad here,’ says Nègre.

‘It’s not bad at all!’

Now that we were rested we could begin to take stock of our surroundings and companions. Before the war, mixed hospital no. 97 had been a religious boarding school called Saint-Gilbert, and ward 11 was in a former dormitory. It was very long room, lit by ten windows on either side, the darkest corner sectioned off, with beds lined up at two-metre intervals. In the middle of the room were dining tables; in the corner, the store cupboards, dispensary, and wash-hand basins. The ward was painted pale yellow, and was spotlessly clean; there were even vases of flowers.

‘All in all,’ continues Nègre, ‘a pleasant place to be in pain.’

‘I’m not in pain. You?’

‘Not a lot.’

We watch the nurses scurrying around busily. (‘The brunette’s not bad.’ ‘The tall one’s OK, too.’). They are getting the measure of this new batch of patients, choosing their favourites. They stop at the foot of each bed and call out to each other, a little too casually:

‘Mademoiselle Jeanne, come and take a look at this one. Doesn’t he look young?’

Unshaven and feverish, the wounded man who has lost the habit of talking to women, if he had ever acquired it, shrinks down under the blankets, blushes, and gives stupid answers to young ladies whose confidence intimidates him.

‘You’d think these lasses were playing with their dollies!’

They are very polite and display considerable willingness to help. But you can still feel a certain distance in their tone, which shows that we are not from their milieu. Caring for us is a patriotic task, a humane gesture which they deign to make but which does not overcome the distance born of different upbringing. They keep the prejudices of their caste and address officers in a different tone. Nègre grumbles:

‘We’re going to look bloody stupid if this carries on! We didn’t put up with shells and bullets in order to get pushed around by a bunch of hoity-toity brats!’

‘You’re right. It’s high time we restored a bit of order.’

A nurse is just passing. I wave her over and, once she is at my bedside, I say:

‘Mademoiselle, I need some notepaper, some cigarettes, and a newspaper. Can you sort that out?’

‘Certainly, monsieur. We get the Écho de Paris here.’

‘No doubt you do. But I want L’Œuvre , mademoiselle. Shall I give you the money?’

‘And I need some pipe tobacco,’ chips in Nègre, ‘and a ballpoint pen.’

She notes all this down and assures us that we’ll have it all in a couple of hours, then returns to her friends, looking a little astonished.

Nègre rubs his hands together.

‘Excellent, excellent! As the general always said: “Attack, attack, attack! Always go on the offensive! Get the upper hand over your adversary and demoralise him! Attack and attack again!” Any staff officer from military college who knows what he’s about would say the same.’

This is how I first hear of the famous General Baron de Poculotte, such an intimate friend of sergeant Nègre that he chose to make him his confidant. This leads me to question my neighbour on his past. I don’t get anything very precise out of him. ‘Ah well, you know, I’ve done this and that!’ Later, in the course of various conversations, I learned that he had travelled abroad, had been a man of business, sold different products, some kind of trader. I think I also understood that he’d collected bets in cafés, and he seemed impressively well informed on drug-trafficking and the ways of the demi-monde… In short, he was a charming companion, his head full of stories and unexpected knowledge.

Our little initiative had been pointed out to the other nurses, who observed us at a distance, and, for the first few days, didn’t come near us except to perform their medical duties.