Gabriel Chevallier - Fear

There is another little thing. Right in front of my bed there is a chest on legs, a sort of storage box. Whenever Mademoiselle Nancey comes by for a chat, she jumps up and sit herself down on this chest, obviously pleased to show how nimble she is. This sudden movement pushes her skirt up high, revealing a little glimpse of thigh above her dark stockings. (Her legs are muscular, but rather pretty: one of her best features, as she surely knows.) On one occasion my gaze alighted on this thigh and she caught my eye. I turned away in embarrassment. But I noticed after that she always sat down with the same revealing movement, and then stared at me without a blush. It seemed to me that she didn’t need to uncover so much of her flesh… In short, I had been allowed to share the secret of this sturdy leg and its white skin. Henceforth it would be imprudent not to look at it — discreetly, but with feeling. To show that I was aware of it, that I appreciated it.

I am sure that, with the very best intentions, that is what it was. I recall the words of someone with experience: ‘Women all have the same female pretentions and even the most virtuous among them like to convince themselves that they can tempt a man.’ Yes, Mademoiselle Nancey sought to put a price on her virtue. Why refuse her this little pleasure which didn’t threaten mine?

That leg is my guarantee of extra time in hospital. I can lie back and watch others sweep the floors.

It was bound to happen. I’m surprised that the changes in his behaviour which were definitely abnormal didn’t alert me sooner. A young man, however much he’s exhausted and demoralised, should quickly recover, but Charlet only got more depressed and gloomy.

His clenched fingers, facial tics and jerky movements, all indicated the state of his nerves when he entered the ward earlier on. Nonetheless, he began his duties as usual, though without greeting me.

At about one o’clock he suddenly loomed up in front of me. His face was terrifying, the colour of clay, plastered with brown, his eyes were red. He stuck his arm under my nose:

‘Go on, smell it! Smell it!’

‘Come on, what is this?’

He thrust his arm at me violently and I recoiled.

‘Haha! You can smell it, can’t you? You can smell the stink?’

He was staring at me with wild, burning eyes and I couldn’t look away. Bringing his face right up to mine, he uttered these unbelievable words:

‘ I am a piece of shit. ’

‘Charlet, come on now, you’re crazy!’

‘Smell it!’

Even more than his fury, it was the spittle dribbling from his mouth that frightened me. Luckily, someone called out for him:

‘Psst, Caca, over here!’

He leapt up and headed for Peignard, gesticulating wildly.

‘My name is Shit, do you hear, and I will not tolerate your insolence!’

I realised then that he had gone completely off his head, and I feared for the safety of all these vulnerable, wounded men: Peignard with his foot, Diuré with his tubes, the unfortunate Breton. I called out to some of the more able-bodied patients to surround him while we got help. Now completely out of control, he tried to escape, shouting:

‘I am your master, you degenerates! All men depend on me! I am the Truth, the ruler of the world!’

Finally three burly young men arrived from downstairs and took him away.

Charlet!

Here is the last vision I have of him in civilian life. One night in the early summer of 1914, under the chestnut trees in the square where we’d all meet every evening. White swans glided silently over the dark, silken surface of the pools by the fountains, the water dappled with light from a brightly illuminated café terrace. A distant orchestra lulled us with its gentle rhythms. And there was Charlet, bare-headed, slim and elegant, sure of himself, even a little spoiled by his precocious success, standing and reciting his own poems. I can still hear his intonation and remember one passage:

Tonight the air is heavy with the scent of the woodland grove

Where she sleeps so calmly, beneath a ray of moonlight ,

Her body so white wrapped in the rich brown sash

Of her hair, where I whisper my secrets

The imperious Empress of my heart.

And now, at twenty-two, he is insane. And his madness has taken the lowest form imaginable.

They change our dressings every morning. My turn usually comes around nine o’clock. A nurse approaches with her therapeutic kit and a brave smile (which costs her nothing). She takes hold of me, undoes the safety pins, unwinds the bandages, and takes off the sticky gauze, giving it little tugs that pull at the lips of my wounds. They in turn pass on the message to the rest of my body, which objects to such a sharp and sudden separation and makes me squeal with pain, something I find deeply embarrassing. The wounds are washed with permanganate and then treated with either tincture of iodine or a silver nitrate pencil. There’s nothing to choose between them: both give me the same pleasant sensation of a red-hot iron being thrust into my flesh, and I am always surprised not to smell burning or see smoke rising. The large number of wounds prolongs my agony. While other wounds are still being cleaned, various points on my body, already soaked in iodine, feel like they’ve been placed on a grill, and I writhe about like a heretic struggling not to abjure his faith. My faith, in this case, being my wish to maintain my decorum despite the pain. The worst is kept for last: the wound in my thorax just below my shoulder blade. When I feel the iodine approaching, I tense up, holding my breath, as if a shell was falling. But it is only a pink hand which pauses and then with cruel suddenness pushes the wad of cotton into the gash in my back so that it impregnates me with its brown saliva, right to my lungs, or so it feels. I receive my final thrust to the heart.

I then spend a good hour cooking on a low flame.

Some days when I know I’m about to flinch, I resist. I camouflage my squeals with curses. And I have a very good mind to give this nurse a slap. How can a woman be so calm while making me suffer!

It’s the bad moment of the day; it spoils my rest and blights my morning awakenings, which it follows closely. But once the pain has stopped, it feels like ages till the next treatment. The hours pass until I reach a peak of peace and calm, which then diminishes until the next morning.

Going to hospital , little more than a year ago, was a dreaded phrase. More than suffering, it suggested the ignominious idea of failure. The middle classes did not go to public hospitals; those places were reserved for workers, child-mothers, and those unfortunates who had wasted their inheritance, ‘squandered the lot’, and thus deserved the worst punishments, those, in short, who had gone to rack and ruin. Families would warn their wastrel offspring, their prodigal sons, that ‘You’ll end up in hospital!’, that is, poor, alone and ashamed. Seeing the forbidding exteriors of these institutions, their gloomy corridors, the miserable huddles of mourners that sometimes emerged, used to make me think vaguely of leper colonies.

But now a hospital is the promised land, the greatest hope for millions of men. And for all the pain and suffering and harrowing sights it can contain, it is still the greatest happiness that a soldier can imagine. Once when someone was carried from an ambulance through the doors to this place his heart would sink, he’d feel afraid. Today, the man brought in on a stretcher knows that the admission note he gets from reception is a passport to life.

And if some senior doctor, blessed with divine powers, walked through the ward and told each patient he would heal his shattered limbs, saying ‘Leave thy bed and walk!’, the chances are that Peignard, Mouchetier and all the others who have been torn apart, after weighing up all the risks that a new, healthy body would entail, and remembering the icy sweat of terror that tortures strong, healthy men, would answer: ‘No miracles, please!’