heard it …”
Her face drawn, she dropped to the stones beside the lines and started running along, shouting:
“François! … François!”
None of us made a pretty picture and we felt no desire to look at one another. It seemed to me that everything was happening in slow motion, but perhaps that was just an illusion. I also remember something like zones of silence around isolated noises which sounded even louder as a result.
One man, then another, then a third jumped down, and their first instinct was to pass water without taking the trouble to move away, or even, in one case, to face the other way.
Farther off a continuous lament could be heard, a sort of animal howl.
As for Julie, she stood up, her blouse coming out of her crumpled skirt, and said in a drunken voice:
“Well, chum!”
She repeated this two or three times; perhaps she was still repeating it when I got out in my turn and helped the woman in black to jump down onto the ground.
Why was it that particular moment that I asked her:
“What’s your name?”
She didn’t consider the question stupid or out of place, for she answered:
“Anna.”
She didn’t ask me what I was called. I told her all the same:
“My name is Marcel. Marcel Feron.”
I would have liked to pass water like the others. I didn’t dare, because of her, and it hurt me to restrain myself.
There was a meadow below the track, with tall grass, barbed wire, and, a hundred yards away, a white farmhouse where there was nobody to be seen. Some hens, around a pile of manure, had all started cackling together, as excited as if they had been frightened too.
The people in the other car had got out, as flustered and awkward as we were.
In front of one of the carriages there was a more compact, solemn crowd. Some faces were turned away.
“A woman has been wounded over there,” somebody came and told us. “I don’t suppose there’s a doctor among you?”
Why did the question strike me as grotesque? Do doctors travel in cattle cars? Could any of us be taken for a doctor?
At the front of the train, the fireman, his face and handsblack, was waving his arms about, and a little later we learned that the engineer had been killed by a bullet in the face.
“They’re coming back! They’re coming back!”
The shout ended in a strangled cry. Everybody copied the first ones who had had the idea of throwing themselves flat on their faces in the meadow, at the foot of the embankment.
I did like the others; so did Anna, who was now following me about like a dog without a master.
The planes up in the sky were forming another circle, a little farther west, and this time we missed nothing of the maneuver. We saw one plane come spiraling down, flatten out just when it seemed bound to crash, skim the ground, soar upward again, and sweep around to cover the same ground once more, this time firing its machine gun.
It was two or three miles away. We couldn’t see the target—a village, perhaps, or a road—which was hidden by a wood of fir trees. And already it was climbing into the sky to join the flock waiting for it up there and follow them northward.
I went, like the others, to look at the dead engineer, part of his body on the footplate, near the open firebox, his head and shoulders hanging over the side. There was no face left, just a black and red mass from which the blood was oozing in big drops onto the gray stones by the track.
He was my first dead man of the war. He was almost my first dead man, apart from my father, who had been laid out by the time I came home.
I felt sick and tried not to show it, because Anna was beside me, and because at that moment she took my armas naturally as a girl walking along the street with her sweetheart.
I think she was less upset than I was. And yet I myself was less upset than I would have expected. At the sanatorium, where there were a lot of dead people, we were not allowed to see them. The nurses acted in good time, coming to collect
Her face drawn, she dropped to the stones beside the lines and started running along, shouting:
“François! … François!”
None of us made a pretty picture and we felt no desire to look at one another. It seemed to me that everything was happening in slow motion, but perhaps that was just an illusion. I also remember something like zones of silence around isolated noises which sounded even louder as a result.
One man, then another, then a third jumped down, and their first instinct was to pass water without taking the trouble to move away, or even, in one case, to face the other way.
Farther off a continuous lament could be heard, a sort of animal howl.
As for Julie, she stood up, her blouse coming out of her crumpled skirt, and said in a drunken voice:
“Well, chum!”
She repeated this two or three times; perhaps she was still repeating it when I got out in my turn and helped the woman in black to jump down onto the ground.
Why was it that particular moment that I asked her:
“What’s your name?”
She didn’t consider the question stupid or out of place, for she answered:
“Anna.”
She didn’t ask me what I was called. I told her all the same:
“My name is Marcel. Marcel Feron.”
I would have liked to pass water like the others. I didn’t dare, because of her, and it hurt me to restrain myself.
There was a meadow below the track, with tall grass, barbed wire, and, a hundred yards away, a white farmhouse where there was nobody to be seen. Some hens, around a pile of manure, had all started cackling together, as excited as if they had been frightened too.
The people in the other car had got out, as flustered and awkward as we were.
In front of one of the carriages there was a more compact, solemn crowd. Some faces were turned away.
“A woman has been wounded over there,” somebody came and told us. “I don’t suppose there’s a doctor among you?”
Why did the question strike me as grotesque? Do doctors travel in cattle cars? Could any of us be taken for a doctor?
At the front of the train, the fireman, his face and handsblack, was waving his arms about, and a little later we learned that the engineer had been killed by a bullet in the face.
“They’re coming back! They’re coming back!”
The shout ended in a strangled cry. Everybody copied the first ones who had had the idea of throwing themselves flat on their faces in the meadow, at the foot of the embankment.
I did like the others; so did Anna, who was now following me about like a dog without a master.
The planes up in the sky were forming another circle, a little farther west, and this time we missed nothing of the maneuver. We saw one plane come spiraling down, flatten out just when it seemed bound to crash, skim the ground, soar upward again, and sweep around to cover the same ground once more, this time firing its machine gun.
It was two or three miles away. We couldn’t see the target—a village, perhaps, or a road—which was hidden by a wood of fir trees. And already it was climbing into the sky to join the flock waiting for it up there and follow them northward.
I went, like the others, to look at the dead engineer, part of his body on the footplate, near the open firebox, his head and shoulders hanging over the side. There was no face left, just a black and red mass from which the blood was oozing in big drops onto the gray stones by the track.
He was my first dead man of the war. He was almost my first dead man, apart from my father, who had been laid out by the time I came home.
I felt sick and tried not to show it, because Anna was beside me, and because at that moment she took my armas naturally as a girl walking along the street with her sweetheart.
I think she was less upset than I was. And yet I myself was less upset than I would have expected. At the sanatorium, where there were a lot of dead people, we were not allowed to see them. The nurses acted in good time, coming to collect
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