Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

Péguy had demanded that Jaurès and his pacifism should be silenced ‘by the drums of the guillotine’.

The officers pass living into legend even when no trace of their mortal remains is ever found, like Alain-Fournier, killed in action, like so many others, his death is summed up by the words of one soldier who survived:

‘The lieutenant’s bought it!’

Then come the phrase-makers, Alain-Fournier is dead, a mortal blow to literature, end of our childhood, the very trees of Sologne are in mourning, the village school is dead, the classroom that smells of hay and stables, everything, the red house, the Virginia creeper, the lamp-lit evenings, Christmas, the great sacks of chestnuts, everything, good things to eat wrapped in cloths, and the pungency of singed wool when some boy stood too close to the stove to get warm, a body was never identified. Fournier’s corpse was absent when they held roll-call.

‘Henri Alban Fournier (the real name of Alain-Fournier) died from a shot in the head,’ reports his brother-in-law, Jacques Rivière, who got it from a private soldier.

‘He was killed by a bullet to the head,’ says Paul Genuist.

‘A bullet in the head, in a heroic action,’ Patrick Antoniol states specifically.

It happened at Saint-Rémy, three weeks after Monfaubert, a bullet in the head, Fournier’s batman said so, name of Jacquot, he saw it all: ‘In the forehead, killed outright.’

Fournier had written:

‘I’ve picked out as my batman a Zouave, a crapulous type who’s good at fending for himself, seen service in Morocco, had two teeth knocked out by bullets, I’m afraid he’s prone to exaggeration Jacquot added:

‘When I got back to him, the lieutenant was stone cold.’

Fournier’s sister does not believe the story about the bullet in the head, Henri didn’t die at all:

‘The bullet in the centre of his forehead was something Jacquot made up, he’d told my parents: “I’ll watch out for the lieutenant”, but he wasn’t at his side, he was in the rear.’

Yet Fournier’s mistress, Pauline Benda — in January she was on stage playing Régine in La Danse devant le miroir displaying a surprising talent for the subtle nuance — Pauline Benda adds:

‘At the exact moment Henri was shot, I felt a sudden pain in the middle of my forehead, as if I had been struck by something.’

In this war which never ends, a year, no, much longer than that, on another occasion altogether, Hans is very hungry, very thirsty, one day he is dying of thirst in a hole he cannot get out of, he tears out the last remaining handfuls of grass, he chews the grass, his teeth crunch on soil, he goes on chewing.

He vows that never again will he lose his temper when normal life returns, after the war, the trees, the paths, the woman he’ll be reunited with, their walks together, he will not get cross when their horses pull on the reins and reach out with their lips to the grass which the dying day is now sprinkling with dew, Hans will turn to look at Lena, they will not waste the moment.

Henri Alban Fournier, killed in action while leading the 23rd Company of the 288th Infantry Regiment. A bullet in the head, his face otherwise unmarked. Rémi Debats, another soldier, saw Fournier hit by a bullet:

‘But not in the head. In the chest. Killed outright.’

Yet another, Zacharie Baqué, a sergeant, sees Fournier leading the assault through the wood, under low branches, trampling the nettles underfoot, crushing the valerian just as Seurel and co. do in Le Grand Meaulnes , and Seurel himself stands at the forest’s edge ‘like a patrol which the corporal leading it has lost’, along paths of green grass under the leafy branches they run, red breeches and blue frock-coats, to debouch, as if chasing game through the woods of Sologne, with the brambles snatching at your sleeve, ‘suddenly,’ said Seurel, ‘I came out into a sort of clearing which turned out to be a meadow.’

Captain de Gramont and Lieutenant Fournier ‘fire shots with their revolvers’, Baqué sees Fournier ‘on the ground, not moving’, he hears a voice choking, it’s Second-Lieutenant Imbert fatally wounded, he cries out ‘Mother!’, Baqué doesn’t tell him what Robinson said to another officer who is dying:

‘Your mummy doesn’t give a damn!’

Instead he just goes on shooting at the Germans.

Now it’s an Englishman, Stephen Gurney, who describes what happens to Fournier:

‘Suddenly, stopped by a bullet in the arm, he dropped on one knee and was never seen again.’

Fournier, in that clearing at Saint-Rémy, like his hero at the end of Le Grand Meaulnes.

At Monfaubert the dragoons are about to find fame, at a gallop, skimming the ground, by Saint George! ‘Contending for glory’, and seven hundred paces a minute, a regulation cavalry pace being set at eighty centimetres, destiny is already flexing its muscles, at sixty paces from the Prussians Captain Jourde stands up in his stirrups and at the top of his voice cries:

‘Chaaarge!’

The cry is taken up by all the officers. Some riders sit up straight to cut a more intimidating figure for the enemy’s benefit, they drop their hands, dig with their spurs. One horse stumbles, a rabbit hole, it falls, rolls on its rider. Enemy fire starts up, still scattered as yet, ineffective. When dragoons charge in formation six abreast, only the leading line is fully exposed, it partly masks the rest of the column, horses and riders are hit but the devastating strike is rare, a wounded horse will continue to gallop long enough to smash into enemy lines, we have rediscovered our spirit, our drive, our bite, the column at full gallop, the rear presses the front to go faster, riders who fall cannot slow the overwhelming mass, we have stopped being only good for rounding up scum, it takes both arms to hold my mare, lying on her neck I aim with the point of my sabre, I have a pain in my belly, in my chest, I am hot and cold, a dragoon for the first time in all the years that he has been learning how to ride, falls, one foot caught in a stirrup, a lump of fear dragged over the grass by an animal determined to overtake the others.

Fournier isn’t dead, Captain Juvin saw him, just wounded, he told the parents of Lieutenant Fournier:

‘I can assure you that there was a German field dressing-station at the spot where he fell.’

‘In that German dressing-station,’ said Isabelle, ‘lay all of our hopes.’

And everyone agrees: Captain Boubée de Gramont launched a pointless and dangerous attack. He said:

‘It is essential that we go after the Hun.’

Testimony of Private Angla:

‘The look-outs had warned us, Huns everywhere. The Captain was off his head, he said “I’ve got the black-rot all through me, say your prayers, lads, in my Company we’re all dead men”.’

Fournier was falling back with his infantry when the Captain made him turn and go after the enemy.

Suddenly there are shouts, all hell breaks loose.

‘It’s a German dressing-station that’s been overrun,’ said Baqué.

‘I’m stuck with a captain who is a swine and so tiresome you could weep,’ said Fournier.

A field dressing-station.

They attacked it, a ‘desperate and heroic’ action. Captain de Gramont, Lieutenants Fournier, Imbert and their men versus a field-station, the Red Cross and German stretcher-bearers.

Bugles, the gallop at Monfaubert, the earth shakes, Hans can see nothing, but he can hear. A French rider held back in reserve comes up to him, Hans stirs, the man puts one hand on his sabre, a voice says ‘No!’, it’s a bad dream, wake up, dream something else, there’s no sabre, none of it’s real, Hans shakes, I know why I left Hans, because he was never there, physically he was there, he called me Lena, smiled when I looked at him, but he didn’t like being there, or rather he didn’t like the person he was when he was there, he called me Lena but it wasn’t quite him, he always gave me the impression that I was dealing with a replacement, he’d sent me a replacement who was a great deal less interesting than he was, than the person he’d set his mind on becoming, and this replacement took only a blundering sort of interest in me. And in this story I became less desirable, I interested the Hans I had in front of me less than the Hans who would come later, there was this replacement who watched the both of us to see what we might turn into from the point of view of the Hans who would come later. He did not want me as I was, he tried to look at his watch, his innocent fingers crept towards his waistcoat pocket, all this is splitting hairs, I can sum it all up by saying that he was a pain in the neck, he didn’t try to change me but he left me to confront someone who wasn’t really there and with whom I couldn’t really be myself, he was sweet, though still a pain in the neck, irritating and adorable.