Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

He shifted position. Planted his walking stick deeper in the gravel and leant on it with both hands, presumably to take the weight off his trunk a little. He gave a subdued groan. “Never thought pain could be a blessing, my little gazelle. The others, who supposedly have nothing wrong with them, they’re real poor devils. They never get the bombs out of their body.”

It got chilly. He wanted to get up. The blond chap on the other side of the pond had smoked his cigarette and ground out the glowing end under his one shoe sole.

As I helped my brother up, I saw them exchange a glance.

The chap sent him a smile, broad and long enough to call ambiguous. I was gradually beginning to crack the code.

“You can have a prize if you want,” I said.

“Always,” grinned my brother, and offered me his arm.

WAR WAS IN THE DAYS when my body swelled up and ripe was one of the words that I stored in what I imagined as a biscuit barrel in my head: a play memory that housed the last remnants of my children’s verses, alongside the words that mainly fascinated me since they permanently resisted the demon of my curiosity. Repeat any word for long enough and sooner or later it will unwrap itself from all its connotations, and stand before us, threatening in its naked mystery, but “war” had that quality automatically. It appeared to me now too light, then too weak. Although the sound suggested something gigantic, it seemed at the same time as light as a feather: in itself immense, but too lacking in density of composition to attract a clear meaning. Or on the other hand it appeared a word of infinite weight, a sound-shaped black hole that sucked in all thoughts in order to swallow them up as definitions of its unquenchable self.

In that first year the war seemed something wonderful, the heartbeat of a great event that sounded in all things. I could feel the roar of the gun barrels vibrate through my midriff like pressure waves, and saw the clouds of dust hanging over the fields when I peered out of the attic windows in the summer house in France, towards the land of Artois — my beloved Artois, with its rolling fields of grain, spread out between the wooded banks like ever larger sheets, the more dazzling as the stalks ripened, and the roads that meandered half buried through the fields. You could trace their line in the landscape from the hedges bordering them and the trees towering over them. You could tell from the clouds of dust where the soldiers who were heading for the front were.

When I was allowed by my uncle, my mother’s older brother, to use the telescope, which stood up in the attic under a tarpaulin, I could see in those clouds of dust, in places where the roads came up to the same height as the fields, lances reflecting the sunlight, rifle barrels as fine as needles gleaming above a mass of figures marching over the cobbles, or the bustling horses’ hooves of the cavalry, and that dust they dragged behind them like a threadbare veil.

Sometimes the horses were pulling heavy artillery, which from the undergrowth fired short bursts of light at me and left green spots on my retina.

“Look closely,” said my uncle. “There goes history,” and with a sigh he added: “For the umpteenth time.”

He was holding the tarpaulin in both hands, ready to drape it quickly back over the telescope. It was a slightly suspicious instrument in times when everyone was suddenly seeing spies everywhere, but I looked through it at length and excitedly, at the hamlets with their ramparts of trees, above which the spire of the church scarcely rose, at the drinking pools for livestock and the duck ponds, and the roofs of the surrounding farms behind fringes of elder and ash, and again I sought out the great river of men, horses, cannon and rifles, the caravan of dust above the deep green and yellow of summer — and it was as if the war consisted in the first place of a mysterious substance, a kind of spice that mingled with the light and made everything more intense, because I remember I said to my uncle, without looking up from the lens, that what I was seeing was so beautiful.

And he smiled, with the tarpaulin in his hands, an embarrassed smile full of regret that glowed in his beard. “Splendid,” he nodded. “Splendid, but a shame.”

One day I drove with my mother by coach through the fields to the nearby town. She had business to do, purchases to make, but she also wanted to be away for a day or two from the house, which for nearly a year now had of necessity been our home. It must have been late May, perhaps early June. Between the soldiers’ shirts hanging out to dry in the branches of the elder at the side of the road, unripe berries were beginning to swell the almost faded flower clusters. When after a bend the coach unexpectedly drove under that canopy of branches and drying shirts, I saw the amused mockery in my mother’s eyes. We rolled under the drying washing as if we were a medieval royal couple making their joyeuse entrée into a town and being welcomed by the banners of the patricians.

From everywhere in the surrounding fields and fences plumes of smoke rose up, from fires above which hung bubbling kettles. Everywhere soldiers were lying outside their tents lazing about or polishing their boots, or helping each other shave. I don’t know what is most poignant when I think back to those scenes: the indifference of the summer, the light-heartedness of the soldiers as they cooked, did their washing, lazed about, or the flirtatious atmosphere, with all those men with bare torsos while they waited for their shirts to dry, or is it the confrontation with my own naivety?

I was intoxicated by the sight of all those bodies, and by the bustle that the presence of the armies caused in the farmland, the delightful unreality of a countryside that was suddenly flooded with the din of a metropolis. In the villages the schoolchildren flocked around the soldiers, who had pitched their tents in the orchards or bleaching fields. They peered into the kettles above the fires, tried to wangle sweets out of the soldiers or goggled at the rifles that were being polished, the greased saddle equipment that gleamed in the sun.

Soldiers at the side of the road got up when they saw our coach approaching and started cheering us as a joke. I waved back and giggled. My mother shook her head with a grin. I seldom saw her playful, but the frivolity of the situation seemed to inspire even her.

“Hélène, child,” she nagged. “If you wave, at least do it with a bit of dignity. Like this…” She waved stiffly with her gloved fingers, in the manner of a princess regent in a victor’s coach — and I burst out laughing.

If this was history, which according to my uncle I must study well, then history was a delight. I could smell the leather of the boots, the shoe polish, the grease and the scent of those bodies, pale, young, tender. And again I see those good-natured faces, the eyelids that narrow, the sparks of pleasure that glow in them while the lads cheer us, and the hair under their arms when they raise an arm to wave. But I also sensed in my mother that same touch of regret that I felt with my uncle when I stared through the telescope at the blood vessels of the war, which day and night pushed those bodies towards the meat-grinder, to an idiotic death in the trenches or the foxhole.

On arrival we had coffee in the establishment where we were staying, in a side street close to the market square on one of the slopes of the hill on which the town was built. At the window the jovial bustle of a seaside resort in high season lapped past, true, flooded by mainly British tourists, all in the same grey uniforms.

We were almost the only civilians in the restaurant, and we must have looked strangely precious among all that khaki, with our dainty hats, our puffed sleeves and cuffs, the brooch my mother had put on the lapel of her cream-coloured overcoat and not least our gloves, mine in satin, hers in crochet, which gave a certain rococo twist even to the simple gesture of bringing a cup of coffee to your lips.