Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

I replied that what he was risking would be a trifle beside my mother’s wrath if she should ever get to hear of our adventure — she never found out, never believed anything except that I went to the coast with “ ce drôle Monsieur Heirbeir ”, and there somewhere in the dunes or in a boarding house of dubious quality threw away my honour, more or less with the blind-eyed consent of her dearly beloved brother, against whom she declared a winter of discontent which lasted all the longer because she perhaps realized that she had lost the battle for my soul for ever.

The shock when, after driving for a while along deserted roads and seeing only peasants on their way to the fields, we suddenly found ourselves in a stream of soldiers, the dust, the smell of sweat and bodies, the silence, the tread of all those soles over the land and the cobbles — a stream of arms and heads, trunks and shoulders that sucked us along into the arterial system of the war, thrust along the uncountable individual blood cells which made their way between the high verges under the branches of undergrowth and trees.

Here and there, at a bottleneck or where the road made a sharp bend, the flood was checked and we could only drive at walking place. Then he manoeuvred the car between the troops, none of whom paid the slightest attention, as if they were totally focused on their destination — or perhaps it was just their limbs that were going mechanically on, their muscles and joints were taking them blindly northwards, and their thoughts were tarrying meanwhile with what was behind them, what they could not let go of. My husband shook his head. “They live in soldier-time,” he said. “That’s all.”

When gaps appeared in the mass we could accelerate briefly, slaloming, and pass smaller troops of soldiers, not too quickly. No one waved or laughed or whistled, not a voice was raised to call out hello or even to swear. Elsewhere the road clogged up again, and the mass became so impenetrable that we drifted almost automatically towards the side of the road, and I then stood up in the car—“Careful, my lovely,” he said — and through the dust that was thrown up from the soft sand by all those soles and that drifted in a haze above the figures, caught a first glimpse of the face of the war. It did not show a uniform face, rather a countenance that manifested itself in a thousand facets, a face that was a parasite on all those faces, younger and older, one clearer than the other, which I saw as little more than separate noses, cheeks, eyelids and lips under the grey powder of the roads looming up out of that veil of dust, with which the face of this war made itself up — not to look at me but to look through me with a hollow stare.

Now and again from that sea of nameless faces a look lit up, clear as the shine on a drop of dew in the morning mist — the faint smile of a young man whose mouth, just under the sharply defined shadow of his cap, unexpectedly opened in the most radiant joy imaginable, or the rather worried-looking eye of a somewhat older man: his bushy eyebrow was raised momentarily, his head looked up automatically and he gave a resigned, almost imperceptible nod. Since then I know that a look can have fingers, and a whole hand if necessary. Over the years my memory has contracted around those two gazes that nestled briefly in mine; everything else around becomes vague and hazy, only the eyes don’t. They stare at me ever more sharply and compress a whole life into their stare. I had sons and lovers there, and in so many eyes was the daughter of fathers I have never known.

He drummed impatiently on the steering wheel and was about to hoot, but it occurred to him just in time that it was forbidden, and tugged on my coat to make me sit down again, but there was no point. We were half on the verge, half in the undergrowth. When I craned my neck to look over the nearest figures, I saw farther on, through the clouds of dust and the sunlight refracted in them, the contours of the ammunition lorries. They looked like slow mastodons with, between them, on and towed behind other lorries, towards the bed of the shallow valley out of which that stream of weapons and men was making its way, light and heavy artillery — it reminded one of the procession of an ancient people that bore its idols and statues of divinities out of its temples through the country, their fabulous animals, their steel Cyclopses.

“The herds of Mars,” I said, and thought it ridiculous myself.

He repeated that it would be better if I sat down, but I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that it was all these men who were dragging the chariots of destruction onward, by invisible cords over their shoulders, resigned and silent — all that could be heard was the crunch of footwear. The high road verges seemed to retreat from them, just as the sea had opened for the people of Moses, although they might just as well have been Pharaoh’s army, not suspecting that those earth banks could close again at any moment — but then he pulled so hard on my coat tails that I fell abruptly back into the car seat.

He glanced aside, gave me the grin full of reckless courage that needed only half his mouth to win me over to him for ever: “Didn’t mean to hurt you, ma biche , everything all right?” and put his foot down.

The peace that came over us when we turned into a side road in order to make a shortcut, the charm of the countryside the moment we drove just about 100 metres from that stream of people through rolling fields, grassland above which larks fell out of the sky and lapwings whooped, past houses where old people were selling newly harvested onions on benches against the wall under the grapevine — it was all unreal. Around the washing places on the market squares of the villages children stopped as we passed and gaped at us open-mouthed. With coarse brushes women scrubbed blue-white bleach over the thresholds of their houses. It was like a lucid dream, because almost nowhere did you see young men. The tissue of everyday life had holes in it. Ordinariness was walking around in rags but only we seemed to notice.

And sooner or later we saw from a distance that stream of figures shuffling past again — the same figures or different ones. The war created its own arterial pattern of road maps in the landscape, which coincided with the old ones where it was possible, but where necessary it carved new routes through the earth, with railway lines that branched like capillaries, temporary depots, junctions, assembly points, base camps. The fronts, if I had been able to see them from the air, must have looked like gaping, throbbing wounds, which from everywhere, over old roads and new, sucked in flesh and blood and fodder and explosives. And even when we found ourselves on deserted roads we could deduce from the grey-white dust on the hedges that a column must have passed through shortly before — sometimes it looked like a Christmas scene, a sugary, live postcard of snowy hedgerows, above which the sun was warming a new day.

He asked me if I was hungry yet, and I shook my head. We could see the plain in the distance, where the masses of people became less dense. The front was close by, the troops dispersed, set up temporary camps in meadows and beside country lanes. Again I saw, like the year before, when I had been to town with my mother, men stirring kettles that hung bubbling over campfires, and whole trees transformed into stationary galleons, with drying shirts and trousers on the masts, which the wind caught as if they were sails.

You could smell the odour of the fires, of the fat with which the saddlery was greased, you could hear the scraping of the curry-comb on the flanks of horses, and their snorting. Someone was playing the harmonica. Children were still shooting as swift as sticklebacks past the resting men.