Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

‘I smother you all over with tender kisses,’ Caillaux had written to Henriette in letters dating from the time when she was merely his mistress.

Calmette, editor of Le Figaro , five or six shots, wanted to publish them, he is no longer a threat, three bullets, two fatal, in Calmette’s carcass.

At Monfaubert, a bayonet in the belly, slower than a bullet in the head, really much slower, the two French dragoons lay their comrade on the ground, put a stop to it all in the spring, he does not yet know that it will take him four hours to die, Poincaré the warmonger has replaced Fallières, and Caillaux will not now be Prime Minister.

A woman sits half-dressed at dawn, a leather armchair, her back to the light, a cold crimson light, think about the things you love, his mother had said, Hans knows you don’t have either the time or the right to remember the women you’ve loved when you’ve been thrown into a ditch and your comrades are being killed around you, it’s so very vivid, images come in flashes, evening walks down the path outside the hotel, the names of a few stars above the snow, the gurgle of a stream, best give me your arm that way I shan’t slip, holding his arm while they walk, that’s all she’ll ever do, they make their way back to the Waldhaus Hotel, a looming mass in the moonlight, a Belle Époque folly, a cross between a Bavarian Schloss and a fantastic overgrown chalet, two huge chalets eight storeys high standing on a common base itself three storeys tall, the third floor of this common base being occupied by guest lounges and the dining room, the north wing of the hotel terminating beyond the edge of a precipice, the architect having decided to make a bold gesture by extending the base of his building over empty space.

A twenty-metre overhang resting on girders anchored in the granite, propped up four-square, more solid than the Eiffel Tower or the piles of Brooklyn Bridge, the balconies of the rooms on the end of the north side hang over the void.

When he checked in, Hans had refused one of those rooms on the end of the north wing, I am a marine engineer, I built shapes that float on water not in air, the manager defends his hotel, there is no architecture without a gesture, Monsieur Kappler, and the overhang is the hotel’s gesture, because if this were not so it would be just a very large kitsch gateau.

In the evening, the large bay windows lit the valley. They had returned arm in arm.

Later, a ‘good night’ in front of a door, the hand of Lena Hotspur reaches round the back of Hans’s neck, Hans opens his lips.

There are two schools of thought in the matter of kissing, that promoted by the French postcard ‘Ah, supreme embrace which melts all it touches, a kiss on the lips is the gift of the self’, and that of modern medicine which recommends that when the kiss cannot be avoided it should be preceded by a thorough rinsing of the mouth with an antiseptic preparation.

Lena took Hans by the back of the neck and more or less bundled him into her room. The next morning, Hans opened the balcony window and realised that Lena had been given a room on the north side.

In all, twenty-one bodies lie in the common grave at Saint-Rémy, on their backs, heads to feet, two rows each of ten bodies, the twenty-first in the centre covering five other skeletons.

In it are also assorted religious medallions, a gold wedding ring, a rosary, several wallets, a cigarette lighter, a pipe, cartridge cases and cartridges, bullets, 1881 issue reservists’ boots, sundry types of buttons, a pair of false teeth, a few ink pens, numerous gold coins wrapped in paper.

In most cases, the bullets were fired at these bodies from different angles and left wounds typical of traditional warfare: field combat, assault, retreat, what they call a princes’ war. Some had been hit in ways that suggested they had been put out of their misery.

‘Over here, quick!’ Michel Algrain had been told one day in May 1991, ‘it’s beeping it’s head off!’

A soldier’s grave. In the places where soldiers die, enough iron and steel always remains for metal detectors to pick it up: eighteen privates and three officers, a captain, a lieutenant and a sub-lieutenant. The officers wear bespoke boots and are on average ten centimetres taller than their men. Dog tags, the number 228, which is the number of the regimental corps, clipped in brass to collar flaps, stripes sewn on the forearms and shoulders of the first three skeletons, there is absolutely no doubt: here lie Gramont, Fournier, Imbert and their men.

‘The top joint of the right forefinger,’ said an archaeologist, ‘gives us the hand of a writer.’

Remnants of hand-knitted undergarments. A terrific find for an amateur archaeologist.

‘But Michel Algrain,’ commented the Association of the Friends of Jacques Rivière and Alain-Fournier in 1992, ‘went too far. What do these German documents prove? What is the point of stories about some German field dressing-station which he went grubbing around for across the Rhine? Monsieur Algrain should remind himself that no one who goes looking in enemy territory for evidence with which to charge our own side with crimes they did not commit can ever claim to be innocent.’

On 10 November 1992, Algrain will be excluded from the ceremony when the remains are re-interred.

During the winter which preceded the war, Henri had written to Pauline:

‘Somewhere there’s a frozen pond where we would at this moment be skating, a white garden where I’d lead you by the hand, a road where we would go for a long, long walk before it got dark and a room where we would at this moment be sitting together by the fireside.’

A lovers’ dream. The frozen pond, Henri and Pauline executing serene arabesques on the ice, in proper families they would be termed an unlawful couple. They dream of firesides.

Or then again they only speak in their letters of firesides and walks because it is not done in letters to speak of the predatory advances which are made in a bedroom in Paris as the evening gathers, the man talks like this to please the woman, or else he’s the one who dreams he is in the white garden and offers her his dreams, and maybe both of them truly yearn for a happiness constituted by a white garden and a fireside, because nothing else is within their reach, no, what they really like is the dusk and the dark, persistent smells laden with oil fumes which fill the room whenever they have to heat it, but that is the one treat they can neither have nor write about, so they treat each other instead to a white garden, a log fire, chestnuts crackling, she seated in the armchair by the window, momentarily in repose, turned towards the landscape, the window blameless, the breast observed in profile, the snow has consumed everything, the only thing that stirs, faintly on the fence, is the black, white and blue stain of a magpie which had just landed.

At Monfaubert, the dragoons charge, that is, those who have not yet fallen to the rhythm of the noise which is for all the world like the sound of a very large sewing-machine, a Spandau no different from the thousands in service in the German army, manufactured under licence from the British and modified Prussian style.

‘The target must not merely be pierced,’ declared the Emperor, ‘but riddled.’

The dragoons charge in a dream and what they take aim at with the point of their swords, of their lances, of their dreams, are other men’s dreams.

If they’d been faced by ordinary troops, they would not have charged.

Facing them are dreams the colour of doves which have surfaced from the remote mists of time. And if it were not for these dove-grey dreams, there would have been no German victory against the Russians less than a month ago at Tannenberg, dreams which emerged from a labyrinth as old as the act of dreaming itself, but barely make it into the light of day.