Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

A few incidents, no more. Such as the day Hans left, she hadn’t said a word, but she’d seen him sneaking a look at his watch. Hans has never been able to look at his watch casually or discreetly, he always attempts to hide the gesture, one hand carelessly loitering near the fob while at the same time doing all he can to be seen, because it is not right to dissemble, he manages the thing in such a way that he can be observed in an attempt to dissemble though not quite obviously enough to be caught in the act, for then it would not be dissembling; the guilty hand slides over the cloth of his waistcoat, the thumb giving the impression of seeking support in the opening of the little watch pocket, the other fingers being already much lower so no one could suspect them of trying to slip round the watch nestling in that pocket, but as the hand creeps down, the reprimand will out.

Hans does not allow the opportunity for this to arise, he waits until the woman he is conversing with has her back to him before he looks at his watch.

And she who has observed him placing his hand over his waistcoat pocket is generally forced to keep what she knows but cannot see to herself, she is seized by doubt, she may have been mistaken, it shortens her temper, she must find something else to criticise, her back is turned to him, she looks out of the window, the woman who suffers faces the man who is bored and suddenly she blurts out:

‘You don’t look as if you are here.’

On this occasion, Lena had spotted the gesture and Hans’s hand, caught in the act, instead of sliding had come to a sudden rest, Lena had said in French:

‘Punctuality is the courtesy of kings.’

Had she really been as cross as that?

Still further along in both space and time, later, a year, three years later, in the middle of the war, at the end of the war, who can tell? Hans saw a comrade return from the firing line holding his entrails in his hands, and he thought of those first months of the war, of the day he had almost been skewered on the end of a French dragoon’s sabre, then, seeing his wounded comrade, he remembered fabled King Renaud and thought or almost sang in French, the language which was always current in his family — and it mattered very little that they lived on the shores of the Baltic, at Rosmar, in a Reich which was increasingly adopting its true tongue, the French of Racine, Stendhal and, yes, even Tallement des Réaux was part of the air you breathed if you were civilised, even young people used bits and bobs of Parisian argot — seeing his comrade returning long after the others, Hans thought old King Renaud ‘is come home from the wars’, hummed it in French, breaking the word up to accommodate the rhythm, ‘de gue-erre revient’, despite all they’d been saying lately about France.

And the comrade who was holding his guts like King Renaud wanted to go on walking with his knapsack on his back as he used to walk in the old days, in peacetime, the grape-harvest, with the pannier which stood out whitely against the green of the vines, at Grindisheim, in the sunshine, he had walked to fight off the fever he had caught one evening sitting by the fire with his back to the door, because walking cures every ailment, he had walked like Renaud carrying his entrails.

And two days later, the wounded man would write to his wife:

‘I can’t walk any more, it hurts like nobody knows when they fish bits of bone or shrapnel out of me, nobody knows how much, they gave me an enema which did no good, I’m in a bad way, I didn’t want to say anything in my last letter, dearest, I didn’t want to bother you.’

At Monfaubert, the dragoons are in action, the fire in their bellies stoked by thoughts of glory, country, the sergeant-major barking orders, revenge for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, a single body, the anxious, tortured faces of those who have come under fire before, features twisted and apprehensive, the officers ride back up the ranks to enact part of the piece of theatre which is being staged, lithe, ramrod-backed in their boots, a light hand on the reins, a faint smile of excitement on their lips, giving out orders three centuries old, ‘Lower lances!’ or ‘Draw swords!’; when they were three hundred paces from the Prussians, the Captain cried:

‘Attack!’

Ride directly towards the enemy, without hesitation. A hundred dragoons, all ex-farmhands emboldened by terror but emboldened all the same, the column hurtles into the valley of death, it’s hardly the pictorial grouping most likely to satisfy eye and soul, it consists of the two main lines of twenty riders, one line for each troop, the troops being staggered in echelons to widen the line of attack, here the Captain has formed them into columns six abreast to reduce the size of the target offered to enemy fire, it is less spectacular but makes little difference, they sally forth to the sound of the squadron buglers as if they’re on parade, determined to restore the smile to their faces, to settle accounts, to avenge Sedan and Reichstoffen, to forget that once more the battle is taking place on French soil, that once more, as the major newspapers put it, the German army ‘has been drawn into our national space’.

The German sentries facing the dragoons have not yet grasped what is happening. They see a coloured mass emerge against a background of foliage and tree trunks, they hear the bugles blow excitedly, the tune is not a German tune, the full gallop at three hundred metres, the dragoons behaving as if they are on manoeuvres, gathering for the final charge in front of the stands when their speed draws from the lady spectators shrieks like those once heard at jousts in days of yore. Several dragoons fall during the headlong rush but there is no one now to rescue them despite the screams that burst out of their entrails. The rest bear down on Hans’s comrades, the evening sentries who up to that point had detected nothing more sinister than the smell of peas and bacon and potatoes cooking on the embers. All Hans is aware of are gunshots and screams and he feels ashamed.

And Max, in another place at a later date, has watched his CO set off towards the pillboxes after being told one last time:

‘Go and see my sister-in-law, tell her I was hit by a bullet in the forehead, and listen to her story, the one she wants to tell about my wife.’

An almost last, then one definitely last swig of brandy for all ranks and the CO climbs out of the trench at the head of his men, red trousers, blue greatcoats, everyone in full infantry kit, zigzagging in the deathly hush which settles when the men with guns opposite are adjusting their sights and before the bellicose cries which the attackers shout out to forget, Max saw the extinction brought on by the war, to which it clung as traveller’s joy binds itself around the young elm, of everything that had gone before in the days when death still went under the name of accident or disaster, two trains colliding head-on on the outskirts of Melun, the passengers dodging between the flames before falling into the inferno which lit a chaos of shadowy figures, disembowelled carriages, twisted rails, heaped ballast and, looming over it all, the express’s engine, immense, towering, spurting jets of steam.

At the CO’s side marches Lazare, a ladies’ dressmaker, he has written to tell his children that they mustn’t do anything to upset their mother, he makes the company laugh with his jokes which are so much funnier than anything his comrades come up with:

‘When I’m sure of a thing, I bet on it. When I’m not sure, I give my word of honour.’

He laughs with them, with the laughter he has provoked, and for Monsieur Henri Lavedan, a member of the French Academy, this laughter of the trenches is a special kind of laughter:

‘It appeases hunger, satisfies appetite, and quenches thirst when the Hun is all a man has to fill his belly with. Actually, the French soldier could never dispense with laughter. When he fights as when he plays he must go at it heart and soul. He started laughing the day France was mobilised, so come on, my lusty lads, my chaffinches, my lascars! Laugh! Sing! Dance!’