Erwin Mortier - While the Gods Were Sleeping

We crawled to our feet, shuffling on along the central corridor bent double. Above our heads, seemingly grazing the roof beam, a projectile with an ethereal whistle drew a trail of light through the night. A few seconds later a fireball formed, and the front of a burning house stood out like a mask in the dark.

“We must hurry, Maman, It’s far too dangerous here.” I pulled her with me into the stairwell. Below us, a few floors down, others must be making the descent. I heard voices and the bump of soles on the treads. We had to find our way in the dark. I clasped her hand in mine, she did not let go of the bag with the other, and we must have been about halfway down when with a huge thud the whole building seemed to stretch from roof beam to cellar, groaning in all its screws, bolts, seams and ligaments, and then subsided.

My mother had let out a cry and a cascade of jars, flacons and preserves had tumbled out of her bag over the steps. She wanted to bend down and pick everything up, but I pulled her with me. “We haven’t got time. We must get downstairs. We’ll pick it up later.”

The downstairs corridor was swarming with people: soldiers, civilians, kitchen staff, cleaners and the teeming blue-and-white shapes of the nurses bringing patients from all directions in their bare feet, in pale pyjamas to chairs or sofas. Most, I saw, only had wounds to the arms or upper body, and perhaps precisely because of that were being treated in the old boarding house — if necessary they could take flight downstairs under their own steam. We tried to make our way through the throng, to find a place where we could sit down or at least stand and lean against the wall. Outside the storm seemed to be abating, there were still explosions and rattling, but less intense and farther away, farther inland.

“Edgard,” muttered my mother. “Where’s Edgard?”

Doors flew open. Wounded patients streamed in. A woman with a screeching child in her arms wrapped in a soiled sling. A woman staunching the flow of blood from a wound on the side of her head with her scarf. A small boy, deathly quiet, with eyes wide open on a stretcher, apparently insensible to the pain which one of his knees, little more than a bloody mass, must have been causing him. An old woman worked her way into the corridor, hair dishevelled, the sleeves of her coat torn to shreds. “Never thought my corset would save me,” I heard her say to a man, probably her husband, who with one hand was holding in place a tea towel wrapped round his other hand.

*

My mother seemed not to see any of this. She kept craning her neck, regularly held her handkerchief under her nose, surveying all the bustle. It was Edgard she was looking for. She was becoming more restless by the minute.

A second stretcher was brought in. Between the two stretcher-bearers the white and blue of three nurses, busily trying to keep the wounded man under control. A hand grabbed at their skirts. An arm grasped at thin air between their figures. A foot, the thick sole of a lace-up boot, slid doggedly back and forth over the wood of the stretcher. There was a chest rattle, an exclamation smothered in gurgling. The foot kicked the stretcher, the arms grabbed.

Someone shouted: “For the love of Christ, Elsie, keep ’em down!” A second scream. One of the nurses leapt back with unexpected coquettishness, but could not prevent a splash of blood landing on her apron. She looked up for a moment and I recognized the eyes of Miss Schliess. She saw me, and she saw my mother. As she bent back over the wounded man, she said quickly: “Your brother is safe. They’ve got their own shelter outside. Tell her. It’ll put her mind at rest.”

The stretcher-bearer brought the stretcher farther into the corridor. On one of the staircases meanwhile an elderly man appeared, in slippers and pyjamas, with a kepi on his head. His face was stormy. From under his thick moustache a rain of orders descended on everyone’s heads in barking French. Order returned. Logic. Gravity. Wounded over there. Others that way. Sheep were separated from goats, pyjamas from overcoats. The wounded were taken farther into the corridor, where the operating theatres were. The turmoil subsided.

I took my mother to an empty spot on a sofa against one of the inside walls. “Just sit down here, Maman.” Miss Schliess’s announcement had calmed her down somewhat. Outside the storm seemed to be nearing its end. The thuds sounded duller and duller. Now and then a distant bang made the lamps tremble and our abdominal membranes quiver.

My mother sat down, pressing the now empty bag on her lap against her body. A man next to her, a chap in a trilby hat who, resting his hands on his knees, feet apart, was looking around, turned to her and said: “Some weather tonight, isn’t it?” The look she gave him immediately froze his smile.

I left her alone, strolled down the corridor, avoiding groups of people. The faces that looked at me looked empty, broken, and weren’t anything like the restlessness behind the eyes of the refugees who in the first months of the war had been given shelter for the night in barns and stalls. The first came from my fatherland, the villages and towns of Hainaut, Namur, Luxembourg and, besides carts and small carriages with hastily collected children and household effects, brought stories about looting and murder which my uncle had kept as far as possible from my mother, until the papers had taken them up with mouth-watering eagerness. The drama of Dinant. The fire of Leuven. It seemed so far away. We heard only the creaking of the cartwheels in the sand of the road, the dragging soles, the requests for milk, a raw egg for a child or a pregnant woman, and permission to light fires, to heat up their scanty food. “Only in the yard,” my uncle had decreed. “Not in the stables or barns. There are enough houses on fire already.”

*

I looked at the faces around me. A few women, huddled next to each other at the foot of one of the walls, made an all too colourful impression. Under their overcoats shone pearls or gold jewellery, their caps only half hid their coquettishly coiffured hair. I don’t know if what made them look away was shame, and if it was shame, I hope it wasn’t me that provoked it in them.

I thought of the garishness of all too brightly coloured boas, depilated calves, blood-red lips, and the high-pitched cooing chorus of tarts, the bar floozies, the flora of the night and the boudoirs, which rose stronger and louder from all the people cheering on the soldiers, in those first days of August, when stickers had suddenly announced general mobilization everywhere and my mother had cried out in dismay, “War! War!”, as if history was in service with us and had been caught in the wine cellar with the bottle at his lips.

She had sent Edgard and me off in the coach, to see if it was still possible to catch a train in the nearest town with a main station. In the square in front of the station building men were hastily donning their uniforms, the blue waistcoat, the shockingred trousers, and meanwhile kissing crying children, embracing sobbing wives, sweethearts, mothers, sisters. The tarts cooed, threw flowers and I think even underwear at the cannon fodder that marched in closed ranks from the barracks into the square in the unforgivably sweet sun of that August.

I stood upright in the coach. I asked why they were cheering so, the whores. My brother looked up at me, a frown of bemused surprise on his forehead, and nodded in the direction of the departing soldiers. “If that lot don’t do their work, my little gazelle, they may soon be opening their legs for the Prussians. But whether they’ll get paid for it remains to be seen.”

He had watched for a while longer. There were no more trains; war was now rolling over the tracks. “All civilian traffic cancelled,” cried a stationmaster through a mass of mobilized men.