Madame Nietnagel’s face lit up, she carried on in the same vein: ‘This is the hardest passage, you think you’re going to be able to rest the voice but this is the hardest part, and when you are well launched, you tend to go sharp, scheut, the highest — and loudest — note takes fright.’
Madame Nietnagel turned to Hans with an air of complicity which to her was the height of suggestive banter:
‘A young she-goat frightened by the hunter’s beard, do not contract!’
Madame Nietnagel laid her fingers on Lena’s diaphragm:
‘Keep your sides supple, and when you sing low you must save enough breath otherwise the stomach sags forward, which is not at all attractive, don’t you agree?’
She was looking at Hans when she said this.
A war in which prisoners are not killed, the officers are far too busy dying gloriously, leading their men, a bullet in the head, a small clean hole, very little blood, just the red blotch which in the paintings of gifted artists serves to draw the eye of the beholder. The officers die for the legend, they will not sully their glory with an obscene order to have prisoners and wounded men shot, on the day war broke out President Poincaré spoke of ‘the eternal moral power of right which neither peoples nor individuals can disregard with impunity’, these lieutenants and captains die as Péguy died at Villeroi on 6 September, defending right, and from a shot in the middle of his forehead.
Péguy had demanded that Jaurès and his pacifism should be silenced ‘by the drums of the guillotine’.
The officers pass living into legend even when no trace of their mortal remains is ever found, like Alain-Fournier, killed in action, like so many others, his death is summed up by the words of one soldier who survived:
‘The lieutenant’s bought it!’
Then come the phrase-makers, Alain-Fournier is dead, a mortal blow to literature, end of our childhood, the very trees of Sologne are in mourning, the village school is dead, the classroom that smells of hay and stables, everything, the red house, the Virginia creeper, the lamp-lit evenings, Christmas, the great sacks of chestnuts, everything, good things to eat wrapped in cloths, and the pungency of singed wool when some boy stood too close to the stove to get warm, a body was never identified. Fournier’s corpse was absent when they held roll-call.
‘Henri Alban Fournier (the real name of Alain-Fournier) died from a shot in the head,’ reports his brother-in-law, Jacques Rivière, who got it from a private soldier.
‘He was killed by a bullet to the head,’ says Paul Genuist.
‘A bullet in the head, in a heroic action,’ Patrick Antoniol states specifically.
It happened at Saint-Rémy, three weeks after Monfaubert, a bullet in the head, Fournier’s batman said so, name of Jacquot, he saw it alclass="underline" ‘In the forehead, killed outright.’
Fournier had written:
‘I’ve picked out as my batman a Zouave, a crapulous type who’s good at fending for himself, seen service in Morocco, had two teeth knocked out by bullets, I’m afraid he’s prone to exaggeration Jacquot added:
‘When I got back to him, the lieutenant was stone cold.’
Fournier’s sister does not believe the story about the bullet in the head, Henri didn’t die at alclass="underline"
‘The bullet in the centre of his forehead was something Jacquot made up, he’d told my parents: “I’ll watch out for the lieutenant”, but he wasn’t at his side, he was in the rear.’
Yet Fournier’s mistress, Pauline Benda — in January she was on stage playing Régine in La Danse devant le miroir displaying a surprising talent for the subtle nuance — Pauline Benda adds:
‘At the exact moment Henri was shot, I felt a sudden pain in the middle of my forehead, as if I had been struck by something.’
In this war which never ends, a year, no, much longer than that, on another occasion altogether, Hans is very hungry, very thirsty, one day he is dying of thirst in a hole he cannot get out of, he tears out the last remaining handfuls of grass, he chews the grass, his teeth crunch on soil, he goes on chewing.
He vows that never again will he lose his temper when normal life returns, after the war, the trees, the paths, the woman he’ll be reunited with, their walks together, he will not get cross when their horses pull on the reins and reach out with their lips to the grass which the dying day is now sprinkling with dew, Hans will turn to look at Lena, they will not waste the moment.
Henri Alban Fournier, killed in action while leading the 23rd Company of the 288th Infantry Regiment. A bullet in the head, his face otherwise unmarked. Rémi Debats, another soldier, saw Fournier hit by a bullet:
‘But not in the head. In the chest. Killed outright.’
Yet another, Zacharie Baqué, a sergeant, sees Fournier leading the assault through the wood, under low branches, trampling the nettles underfoot, crushing the valerian just as Seurel and co. do in Le Grand Meaulnes, and Seurel himself stands at the forest’s edge ‘like a patrol which the corporal leading it has lost’, along paths of green grass under the leafy branches they run, red breeches and blue frock-coats, to debouch, as if chasing game through the woods of Sologne, with the brambles snatching at your sleeve, ‘suddenly,’ said Seurel, ‘I came out into a sort of clearing which turned out to be a meadow.’
Captain de Gramont and Lieutenant Fournier ‘fire shots with their revolvers’, Baqué sees Fournier ‘on the ground, not moving’, he hears a voice choking, it’s Second-Lieutenant Imbert fatally wounded, he cries out ‘Mother!’, Baqué doesn’t tell him what Robinson said to another officer who is dying:
‘Your mummy doesn’t give a damn!’
Instead he just goes on shooting at the Germans.
Now it’s an Englishman, Stephen Gurney, who describes what happens to Fournier:
‘Suddenly, stopped by a bullet in the arm, he dropped on one knee and was never seen again.’
Fournier, in that clearing at Saint-Rémy, like his hero at the end of Le Grand Meaulnes.
At Monfaubert the dragoons are about to find fame, at a gallop, skimming the ground, by Saint George! ‘Contending for glory’, and seven hundred paces a minute, a regulation cavalry pace being set at eighty centimetres, destiny is already flexing its muscles, at sixty paces from the Prussians Captain Jourde stands up in his stirrups and at the top of his voice cries:
‘Chaaarge!’
The cry is taken up by all the officers. Some riders sit up straight to cut a more intimidating figure for the enemy’s benefit, they drop their hands, dig with their spurs. One horse stumbles, a rabbit hole, it falls, rolls on its rider. Enemy fire starts up, still scattered as yet, ineffective. When dragoons charge in formation six abreast, only the leading line is fully exposed, it partly masks the rest of the column, horses and riders are hit but the devastating strike is rare, a wounded horse will continue to gallop long enough to smash into enemy lines, we have rediscovered our spirit, our drive, our bite, the column at full gallop, the rear presses the front to go faster, riders who fall cannot slow the overwhelming mass, we have stopped being only good for rounding up scum, it takes both arms to hold my mare, lying on her neck I aim with the point of my sabre, I have a pain in my belly, in my chest, I am hot and cold, a dragoon for the first time in all the years that he has been learning how to ride, falls, one foot caught in a stirrup, a lump of fear dragged over the grass by an animal determined to overtake the others.