Armand Cabasson - Wolf Hunt

Relmyer had to control this whirlwind of emotions and to do this he had his blade, which hid an entire universe. The teaching he had followed, the training sessions, his reflections on the meaning of violence, the ability of mathematics to express the most apparently confusing phenomena in the simplest terms: all these interacted to channel the forces jostling within him. Anger, sadness, rancour, rage, anguish, hate, dismay, painful memories and unresolved grief: he managed once again to make all these currents converge towards one aim. To annihilate his opponent. Cauchoit temporarily became the focus of all his suffering.

Cauchoit strutted gracefully, the beautiful embodiment of death.

‘I find there is something of the chicken about you/ he taunted Relmyer. The way you ran away after we were attacked by the grey mice of the Landwehr reminds me of the stampede in the poultry yard when a fox appears. I would wager that your blood has the ruby colour of pigeon blood!’

Relmyer saluted him with his sabre. Cauchoit responded in the same way, then immediately lunged, trying to stab Relmyer in the side, clashed with Relmyer’s weapon and withdrew for fear of a counterattack. A simple test that he judged conclusive. Then he charged at Relmyer. In response to this head-on tactic, Relmyer

produced a complex compound attack. He pretended to parry a lunge to the throat but at the last minute dodged and feinted towards Cauchoit’s chest to threaten his left shoulder. Cauchoit, caught short, beat a retreat.

Relmyer immediately unleashed a frenetic succession of assaults: attacks, composite attacks, false attacks, attacks to the left side, whipped strokes, feints, jabs, false parries, beats, ripostes, parries, unexpected sequences ... He aimed for one side, then the other, the waist, the head, the throat, the side again, the thigh, the right wrist, the left hand ... Relmyer seemed to be able to do whatever he wanted. During his duel with Piquebois, he had studied his tactics. He had, as it were, ingested them and now reproduced them in his own way. Cauchoit, disconcerted, uselessly parried a false attack to the abdomen and received a circular blow full on the temple, which landed him in the dust.

He got up immediately, put his hand to his head and looked at his bloody palm.

‘It’s nothing! What a relief! I thought for a moment I was bleeding.’

Fury made his cut inaccurate. Relmyer dodged and plunged his sabre into Cauchoit’s thigh, pitching him for a second time to the ground.

‘You can see it better now, Monsieur?’

The trumpeter Sibot looked at his friend writhing in pain but the sight made no sense to him. He persisted in thinking that even though he could see Cauchoit on the ground, in reality it was Relmyer who had been defeated. He took several seconds to take in the true situation. And then hesitation gave way to raw violence. Sibot thrust the point of his sword in the direction of Relmyer’s face, bounding forward like a cat. Had he hit his target, the first blood would have been Relmyer’s, flowing from his burst eye, and at the same time from his brain. But Relmyer had been sharpening his reflexes for a long time and he was able to parry the blow even when his adversary’s blade had already almost completely obscured his vision. He counterattacked immediately, thrusting his sabre into the musician’s shoulder. The bone cracked, blood spurted, the man collapsed and Relmyer found himself

motionless, bespattered and dazed, alarmed by his uncontrollable capacity to trigger violence all around him.

Stretcher-bearers hastily gathered up the two élite troopers. Margont noticed the agitated throng pass in front of him and disappear into the little room where he himself had been sewn up. The floor was roughly flagged. After a few operations and one or two amputations, the accumulated blood was sluiced away with large bucketfuls of water.

Margont and Lefine were silent a moment, amazed at what had happened.

‘When Relmyer is not chasing after death, it’s death that comes to him,’ concluded Lefine, finally.

Shortly afterwards the figure of Antoine Piquebois appeared framed in the entrance. Four hussars of the 8th Regiment accompanied him. They were friends from his old regiment with only one desire: to convince him to become a hussar again. To them, their friend’s invalidity was because he was not thinking straight, not for any physical reason. They surrounded Margont and Lefine.

‘Don’t tell me that you all want to fight a duel with Relmyer!’ said Margont, irritated.

‘Not at all. We’re not at his level, alas,’ Piquebois reassured him. ‘Dear friend, I’ve heard all about your chase and your wound ... You know how I love horses. No beast understands man better! Between man and horse a harmony can be established that ...’ Words failed him. There was a gap in his discourse right there where he would have liked to express the heart of it. A tic played at his lips.

‘All right, if no one understood what I was trying to say, let him learn to ride a horse. But there is one particular case - just one! -where an event transcends our love of horses.’

‘One particular case, just one!’ echoed the hussars.

‘It’s when the first horse is killed under you in combat! In Cod’s name, that’s a baptism! It’s like the first girl one beds!’

Piquebois and his companions produced goblets they had been hiding behind their backs. A warrant officer held one out to Margont.

Piquebois, joyously excited, shouted: ‘In honour of the first horse killed under my friend Captain Margont!’

Everyone emptied their goblets, the warrant officer clinking for two people since Margont refused his glass.

‘You’re all stupid!’ exclaimed Margont. ‘I was almost killed, I ... Oh, get out! Go on!’

Piquebois and his companions went on their way, laughing. They were young and there was a war on: life was sweet. That was the way they saw the world ... In spite of the shooting pains travelling through his battered body, Margont turned to Lefine.

‘Why am I surrounded by idiots?’

‘It’s because you attract them, damn it!’

‘Listen to me: Jean-Quenin thinks I will be able to leave hospital the day after tomorrow, so I’ll leave this evening. That will be good enough; he is always too cautious. Go and see our major and tell him from me to make sure Antoine doesn’t leave our regiment; he can tell him that he’s putting him on guard or that there’s going to be an inspection of the company, or anything at all that will keep him there ... Because otherwise the malady of our friend Antoine, the “hussar manque”, will recur and we will have two Relmyers for the price of one. Can you also find me a new horse and keep me informed about the prisoners? If one of them finally decides to talk ...’

Lefine sniggered. ‘Isn’t it enough for you, all that’s already happened?’

‘No!’ persisted Margont. ‘It would take a great deal more than that to make me give up.’

‘For heaven’s sake! At the rate things are going, you’ll soon have your “great deal more”!’

But Margont was no longer listening. Luise had just arrived in the company of a hussar that Relmyer had sent to inform her what had happened. She was in tears and the man had to point out Margont before she spotted him. She crossed the room, lifting her pale blue dress slightly, but the bloodstains had still accumulated at the bottom and were gradually creeping up the azure material. She stopped in front of him.

‘Is it serious?’

‘No, it’s nothing.’

‘Why did you let yourself get wounded?’

She leant over him. Margont thought she was going to kiss him, but she slapped him hard.

‘Idiot!’

She immediately left as the wounded soldiers guffawed. Lefine shrugged his shoulders philosophically.