Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

The sisters took one too, which they shared after they had lit it. “Nothing better against the mosquitoes, isn’t that so, Josine?” cooed my aunt.

“Absolutely, Yolande,” echoed her sister.

We were silent. Around me three orange points of light glowed whenever the sisters, my uncle and my brother puffed on their cigars. I enjoyed their pleasure and listened to the sounds of the night. A cow coughing somewhere beyond the stables. The first call of the owl. The high-pitched, ethereal squeak of the bats which sailed round the tops of the beeches and the crunch when an insect was ground up in their jaws. Only above the roofline at the far end of the inner courtyard was there a band of fading light.

“We’ll have to wait and see what tomorrow brings,” said my uncle at last. His voice suddenly sounded deeper, because of the tobacco.

He exhaled. “Wait and see…” he said again, more softly this time.

I looked on as they finished their cigars and saw how their faces glowed briefly as they sucked oxygen into the tobacco, and how afterwards darkness took possession of us all.

LESS THAN SIX MONTHS later at least one in three of all the servants who greeted us on the evening of our arrival would be dead. I could list their names, erect on paper my private monument with the inscription “ Mort pour la Patrie ”, but memorials are leaden euphemisms: sacrificial dishes or garlands of flowers that we place on altars to drown out the stupefaction in all those bodies. I have always made it a point of honour to read the lists of names on each of those monuments, even the tiniest villages I visited, and invariably their orderliness left me with a wry aftertaste. They stood there, chiselled row on row in bluestone, an alphabetical litany, like the words in a dictionary, but without the slightest explanation, except for their year of birth, and the date of their death, which broke off their oh-so-young etymologies.

There should be mausoleums and extensive cemeteries for the torn-off limbs, the amputated arms or legs, the missing organs. Headstones should be carved under which rest, for example, the hands and feet of Sylvain Gaillac, youngest son of Mr and Mrs Gaillac, who right next to the town hall in my mother’s home village ran a wine and liqueur business and who dismissed with typically French nonchalance the fact that their good-looking youngest son was in favour with the girls at the fairs — till he came back without hands or feet. A suckling pig or sacrificial lamb ready for the spit, that’s what he looked like, a man-sized infant whom Maman and Papa had to push round in a wheelchair at fairs where not even a milkmaid would give him a second look. He, Sylvain Gaillac, single-handedly responsible for several deflowerings in the undergrowth behind the roundabouts, late at night during the midsummer ball, now had to be fed three times a day as one feeds an orphaned thrush chick, spoonful by spoonful, mouthful by mouthful, and for the rest of his days couldn’t even wipe his own arse. There should be a burial chapel commemorating without inflated heroics the right arm of our groom Adelin Rivière, very popular because of the only talent he was able to develop before the front decimated him: his sensitivity during the freeing of a calf from the inside of a cow that threatened to die in calving, the clairvoyancy of his hands, as if, as my uncle said so often, that fellow could feel with his hands how the calf was twisted in her abdomen, and how to release it unharmed. And where is the grave for the left hand of his cousin Hubertin, who had no special merits and was only missed on a farm where manpower was always useful when that hand wasn’t there any more — and that was how the war gave countless men back: withholding an arbitrary percentage of flesh. It should have its own cemeteries, rows of tombs for arms, legs, feet, fingers, toes, or a wall for urns with, under small stone covers, for example the testicles of Olivier Douilhet, waiting to be reunited with the rest of Olivier Douilhet, who, it was whispered, took a feeble pride in the fact that some ladies were curious about his absent sex and sporadically rewarded a few by dropping his trousers and showing the fold between his thighs, and how he could make water with it like a woman. Olivier Douilhet grew old, since eunuchs are long-lived, and all through his long life he counted himself luckier than his mate Claude Outremont, for whom the same grenades that unmanned Olivier had spared his balls but had mashed up his cock — there should be memorials for anonymous lumps of flesh, missing in action: bits of rump, thigh muscle, bum and prick, and ossuaries for the splinters of bone of men like François Hautekier, who was a son of the smith, ready to succeed his elderly father above the glowing coals and the anvil, but in whose hip the doctors artificially created a gaping hole so that they could easily cut away fragments of bone with forceps, when gangrene attacked the bone and the microbes reduced it to black mush.

In those cemeteries for fractions of bodies I wouldn’t erect a cross, or a statue of a grieving soldier leaning on a sword with head bowed. In a column or a wall I would insert in glass niches the eyeballs of everyone who has lost an eyeball, including at least four eyeballs from local lads, so that the past would continue to gape at us without a fringe of eyelashes ever closing over those icy stares — a grotesque, obscene memorial, certainly, but one which also commemorates, just not eloquently or in hushed reverence, but mockingly or cynically, silently shrieking.

I understand why my brother said later that those who were wounded were usually the lucky ones. I understand that their wounds — the cavities that may or may not have closed, the membrane of skin where jawbones had been shot away, the missing knuckles, the eye socket in which soft new flesh replaced the vanished pupil — left a mark in those young bodies, even if in the form of an absence, which had, as it were, hewn out a tabernacle in which they could house their disaster, just as in the medieval reliquary shrines the toenails of martyrs or splinters from the Cross were stored and on certain occasions shown to the faithful. Their misfortune, to use my mother’s love of tautology for once, was their misfortune.

But what is one to do with the others, the apparently unharmed? What mausoleum, for example, would be suitable for young Etienne Leboeuf, who took part in — perhaps I should say sat out, the way we sit out a storm that overtakes us in the open — almost every campaign behind that scar of trenches and barbed wire between the coast of my fatherland and the Swiss border without getting so much as a scratch, and changed his soldier’s tunic for the same grey peasant’s smock that he had taken off in the summer of 1914 like so many, millions, to obey the order of the generals, the ministers and the posters on the market square, where that word was suddenly there, unattainable and virginal, not yet pierced by definitions or my own breathless memories: “ Guerre …”

Etienne Leboeuf, twenty-four, with his brown curls and his blue eyes and a blunt, touching, turned-up nose above his eternally scabby lips; Etienne Leboeuf, whose small, compact frame was indeed slightly reminiscent of a bull calf, and in whose eyes something of the passivity of calves shone; Etienne Leboeuf, who never spoke a word about the war and was not very talkative anyway — I imagine him in the trench with the stubborn passivity of a bull calf sheltering under a tree during a storm. Not realizing the risk it is running, it stands there rubbing against the trunk, apparently unmoved by even the most powerful lightning or the most violent thunderclaps; it blinks, shakes its head, waves its tail and flaps its ears to keep the rain off. I think of what my brother, equally tight-lipped, told me very occasionally, about the most silent death you could witness in the trenches, when the forager with his tins of provisions for the men in a forward post nearby slipped off one of the duckboards and found himself in the sucking mud of a crater full of quicksand — the silent conflict of someone who knows that if he dares call out he will attract the attention of the enemy and endanger not only himself but especially his mates, and at the same time feels himself sinking, and every swing of his trunk or arms in order to free himself gives the mud the opportunity to suck him down even deeper. “All we could do was listen,” said my brother, “grinding our teeth, crying, cursing under our breath, I experienced it at least three times or so, once so close I could hear the lad breathe, the doggedness with which at the last he grabbed the mess tins and the soup tins in his vain attempts to gain a hold — I can still hear the tin of the lids and handles tapping as he pulled our food basket towards him, the breath in his nose, more hectic and violent as the situation became more acute and he tried to scoop away the mush, but with every gesture simply hastened his end. My little gazelle,” said my brother, “I actually prayed then, dammit — and the restless breathing, the cough and the retching at the first gulp of mud in the throat, and the last, almost disappointed sigh before the brown goo reached his lips and nostrils, and the pool closed over him. I don’t know how many met their end through stupid accidents and not even through the bombs.”