"Hi, men!” I call again! "Hi, men!..hi, chumps! hi, buddies!.. how’s it going in there?”
They don’t answer. They don’t move!..
"Shit, they’re frozen!”
I drag everyone along with me!.. I want to go and talk to them myself! talk to them from close up!.. right to their faces. Ah! no use gripping me!. I’m stronger than anything! They twist me!.. I scream!.. at least fourteen clerks!. and two. three old maids!. who grab me by the balls!.. I’ve got the strength of ten!.. the whole staff!.. the ushers!. I drag them along! The whole human bundle!. toward the back!.. the dark!.. I want to talk to my pals!
.. where they’re standing all bleeding!.. all pale there!. at attention. I want to touch them!. It’s done!. I touch them!. They’ve disappeared!. Hell!. What d’you know! I yell it out loud!. A fake!. Another low-down lousy trick!
.. They’ve fled!.. evaporated!. Their tough luck, damn it!.. They’ll pay!.. They won’t find anyone in the big Hole!
They’re all cannon fodder!. I’d recognized all of them!
All the pals from the Leicester!. They’d seen me, too!
They simply disappeared!. With their guts around their waists. in the back of the Consulate room!..
"Come on! downstairs!.. go on down!.. Get him out of here!”
That’s how I’m treated! how the ushers do their job! Ah! but it’s a fight! I want to stay there on the floor, musing, thinking. I throw myself under a bench. They grab me, yank me, pull me apart. Ah! they’re furious! I’ve driven them to the limit! Even the dear, kind doctor… No one’s got any patience left!.. All of them charge at me together!.. All the Consul’s employees!.. all of them furious, men, women, girls!.. I stagger! I roll! I collapse!.. I go crashing down to the bottom of the stairs!.. “Vive la Franee!” I yell in spite of it all.. Vive Bedford Square!.. Vive VAngleterre!”
"Get out!.. Get out!” they yell back.. That’s how they answer me!. And they all start viciously tearing at me again!
.. pulling me apart!.. ripping my jacket!.. the ushers, the secretaries, the vice-consul, the Consul himself!..
"I’m the Consul! ” he warns me.
Ah! the dog!.. He wears glasses like the rest of them!.. He comes to insult me!..
"Get the hell out of here, you bum! ”
Impossible to be cruder.
"You’re being coarse!” I answer. "Hurray for the French Army! ”
Ah! he won’t stand for that! he rears! he stamps! rage! he jumps up and down!..
"Get him out of here!.. Get him out! ” he says to the four "commissioners” on duty.. Real huskies, Herculeses, who act then and there!.. I’m lifted up!.. The door wide open!.. The street!.. I leave in a trajectory!.. A projectile!.. I have a commanding view!.. Hanging in the air!.. A rocket!.. I soar high above the sidewalk, a new weapon, over the crowd!
.. and plop!.. I fall smack into it!.. right into the Russians.. Ah! a mess!.. They gurgle awful when they get me!.. I’ve knocked five of them clean out!.. They’re lying there!
all five!.. The women start pounding me!.. tearing away what’s left!.. I stagger into their bellies.. emigrants with kerchiefs, peasants bound for America… I’m being sworn at by an entire people!.. I can’t free myself from the tangle of limbs and bodies. I walk on the bodies lying there.. People are walking all over one another.. The bodies are yelling at me horribly, in Russian, in Italian, in Czech. The meanest loudest bellyacher lying there knocked over is a little Chinaman, a little guy in a gray silk robe with a thick roll of papyrus stuck under him, a big papyrus with seals! he picks it all up in a fury, he stands up. and his umbrella and his big artist’s hat.. his chestnut stove.. he adjusts his bow!.. and he starts giving me hell!.. He takes me aside!.. He was a Frenchman, and no mistake!.. not the slighest accent… dressed up like a Chinaman!..
At first I stood there dumfounded.. then I pulled myself together.. and then I let him have it!..
"You stinker!.. Keep quiet!” I snap at him.
"You vandal! You hooligan!” he answers back.
"Who’re you talking to?” I ask.
"To a brute!.. to a murderer! ”
"You’re quite right, Monsieur!”.. I agree with him right off! I go him one better!.. Am I proud of being a murderer!
.. Ah! he hit it on the head! Boy, have I killed!.. Let him say it!.. Ah! and how!.. Ah! I’m rarin’ to go!.. I start reeling it off!.. "I killed ten of ’em!.. I killed a thousand!
.. I fell from the sky!.. You saw it! you saw with your own eyes, you phony Chink! ”… Boy, am I laughing!.. What an act!.. "You stinker!” I was yelling in the middle of Bedford Square!.. We were having a good time now!.. not only me… the whole crowd!..
Then I take a good look at the little hothead.. I begin to get the feeling he’s not so dumb as the others… I gn.b hold of him! Whoop! I drag him along!.. by the sleeve.. This time it’s me taking the initiative!.. I had something to say to him!.. We’re still being shoved and whirled around.. flattened.. rolled.. finally pushed out!.. He starts adjusting his hat.. with its big brim… I had to explain things to him.. confess in detail!.. I suddenly felt the urge!.. it was also a kind of excuse… to let him know how things stand!. everything that’s happened to me.. and that it’s out of the ordinary!.. some of the whys and wherefores of my trouble!.. so that I shouldn’t keep the whole business for myself.. He reties his bow!.. very carefully.. We’d sat down on the curb under the sycamore on the square..
"Hmm!.. Hmm!”. he kept saying as I told my story.. pretty sceptical, I could see! He had doubts about what I was telling him.. "Listen to that big talk!” he was thinking.. "a young man showing off. wanting to dazzle an old fellow like me!” Ah! still and all I wanted to convince him! I’m stubborn about it! So I start all over from the beginning!.. How at the Hazebrouck Hospital they thought my leg was done for, that they were ready to amputate it.. and my arm at the same time!.. That shows what a beating I’d taken.. my head, besides. meningitis… a small splinter in my left ear.. it was so serious and feverish that they wondered from one day to the next.. on the verge of going haywire, just about ready to kick off.. I’d made a real friend in the hospital ward in Hazebrouck.. Saint Eustache Ward!.. exactly!
.. Raoul Farcy, left hand wounded.. Raoul Farcy of the 2nd African Battalion.. Like me!.. same ward.. two beds away! Saint Eustache Ward.. They operated on his hand. He also yelled the same thing after his operation… He took a liking to me. we’d made great plans.. We were exactly the same age. "We’ll both go to London!”.. It was settled!.. He talked about when it would be over!.. He was looking forward to it for the winter!..
"You’ll get an idea at Uncle Cascade’s!.. about the way things work!.. You’ll see something of life!.. You’ll see his place!.. Uncle Cascade’s been in the African Battalion too!” He was always talking about this Cascade.. In short, bright prospects!.. Real attractive plans!.. I needed some.. Life looked shitty to me!.. I was even falling more and more to pieces!.. Saint Eustache Ward!.. Pus was coming out of me everywhere!.. They’d done three eburnations of the humerus and the tibia, all of that had been attacked… I had my fun I’m telling you! and then the drains, tents and plasters. bits of bone pasted together… it hurt so much that I’d howl almost every night.. Finally, little by little like that, from one good plan to another, it was Raoul who really perked me up!.. by morale, got to admit it! I needed it!