In the guts! shrieks the Prussian who is holding the dragoon from behind, the blood trickles from a gash in his face, the Prussian is finding it increasingly difficult to keep the headlock on from behind, but the dragoon is a lawyer and isn’t trained for hand-to-hand combat, doesn’t know how to bend his knees suddenly, shift his weight forwards, and throw the soldier who has him in the headlock over his shoulder so that he lands on the bayonet of the soldier facing him, all the dragoon can do is lash out with his feet, ‘In the guts!’ screams the Prussian, the insult, Poincaré’s wife wasn’t really widowed in the United States and her civil marriage to Poincaré made her a bigamist, there was a bigamist in the Élysée Palace, but the Church stepped in, Cardinal Andrieu giving Poincaré his backing for the sake of morality, the cross, for Lorraine and a promise.
The bayonet slips, cuts deep into the hands of the German who is holding it, the dragoon yells for help, kicks his legs out in front of him, let us dance, said Le Figaro, since everyone else is dancing, the very dead will do a tango, the promise that the Poincarés would be married in church, the blessing to be given during the next parliamentary session, the session immediately following the presidential election, two unseated French cavalrymen come up scattering Prussians, whirling their sabres like windmills, the Cardinal goes to work on Catholic members of parliament and senators, Poincaré, vote for him, he’s changed sides, his soul is in our camp.
The Prussian soldier finally gets a good grip on the bayonet, Jesus! don’t leave me by myself, the dragoon’s voice cracks, his two comrades wheel around the Prussians who will not let him go, and around them other Prussians come running, one of them gets his skull split from the top of his head to his teeth, a wounded horse rushes past at a triple gallop, its rider clinging on to his pommel, a church wedding is a small price to pay for entry to the Élysée, the people’s mood is calm, he will go to war, you know, even the members of Bonnot’s gang who were sentenced to death were executed without any fuss or unrest, it was enough to show them who was in charge, Poincaré the warmonger elected President, a republican to be sure, but one who had managed to get himself elected by reactionaries, it was treason!
No, there was no treason, the left, Poincaré said, had insulted his wife, a good argument, a U-turn and lurch to the right, the Prussian holding the dragoon from behind releases his grip, Poincaré became President, there were now two hopes for peace, the first was called Caillaux, he was to become Prime Minister, he had already staved off one war with Germany.
The dragoon is almost free, another dragoon comes up on the Prussian who is holding the bayonet, at the last moment the bayonet pierces the stomach of the dragoon who thought he was safe, the full length of a bayonet slides into soft tissue, the dragoon screams, the Prussian receives a cut from a sabre, the other dragoons grab their comrade under the arms, must get away, sabre-thrusts right and left as they make a run for it, the Prussians give up, the two dragoons see their comrade’s wound, don’t leave me behind, with Caillaux as Prime Minister there would be peace despite Poincaré as President, and Henriette Caillaux, large dark hat with a feather and black muff, fires six shots with a gun.
‘I smother you all over with tender kisses,’ Caillaux had written to Henriette in letters dating from the time when she was merely his mistress.
Calmette, editor of Le Figaro, five or six shots, wanted to publish them, he is no longer a threat, three bullets, two fatal, in Calmette’s carcass.
At Monfaubert, a bayonet in the belly, slower than a bullet in the head, really much slower, the two French dragoons lay their comrade on the ground, put a stop to it all in the spring, he does not yet know that it will take him four hours to die, Poincaré the warmonger has replaced Fallières, and Caillaux will not now be Prime Minister.
A woman sits half-dressed at dawn, a leather armchair, her back to the light, a cold crimson light, think about the things you love, his mother had said, Hans knows you don’t have either the time or the right to remember the women you’ve loved when you’ve been thrown into a ditch and your comrades are being killed around you, it’s so very vivid, images come in flashes, evening walks down the path outside the hotel, the names of a few stars above the snow, the gurgle of a stream, best give me your arm that way I shan’t slip, holding his arm while they walk, that’s all she’ll ever do, they make their way back to the Waldhaus Hotel, a looming mass in the moonlight, a Belle Époque folly, a cross between a Bavarian Schloss and a fantastic overgrown chalet, two huge chalets eight storeys high standing on a common base itself three storeys tall, the third floor of this common base being occupied by guest lounges and the dining room, the north wing of the hotel terminating beyond the edge of a precipice, the architect having decided to make a bold gesture by extending the base of his building over empty space.
A twenty-metre overhang resting on girders anchored in the granite, propped up four-square, more solid than the Eiffel Tower or the piles of Brooklyn Bridge, the balconies of the rooms on the end of the north side hang over the void.
When he checked in, Hans had refused one of those rooms on the end of the north wing, I am a marine engineer, I built shapes that float on water not in air, the manager defends his hotel, there is no architecture without a gesture, Monsieur Kappler, and the overhang is the hotel’s gesture, because if this were not so it would be just a very large kitsch gateau.
In the evening, the large bay windows lit the valley. They had returned arm in arm.
Later, a ‘good night’ in front of a door, the hand of Lena Hotspur reaches round the back of Hans’s neck, Hans opens his lips.
There are two schools of thought in the matter of kissing, that promoted by the French postcard ‘Ah, supreme embrace which melts all it touches, a kiss on the lips is the gift of the self’, and that of modern medicine which recommends that when the kiss cannot be avoided it should be preceded by a thorough rinsing of the mouth with an antiseptic preparation.
Lena took Hans by the back of the neck and more or less bundled him into her room. The next morning, Hans opened the balcony window and realised that Lena had been given a room on the north side.
In all, twenty-one bodies lie in the common grave at Saint-Rémy, on their backs, heads to feet, two rows each of ten bodies, the twenty-first in the centre covering five other skeletons.
In it are also assorted religious medallions, a gold wedding ring, a rosary, several wallets, a cigarette lighter, a pipe, cartridge cases and cartridges, bullets, 1881 issue reservists’ boots, sundry types of buttons, a pair of false teeth, a few ink pens, numerous gold coins wrapped in paper.
In most cases, the bullets were fired at these bodies from different angles and left wounds typical of traditional warfare: field combat, assault, retreat, what they call a princes’ war. Some had been hit in ways that suggested they had been put out of their misery.
‘Over here, quick!’ Michel Algrain had been told one day in May 1991, ‘it’s beeping it’s head off!’
A soldier’s grave. In the places where soldiers die, enough iron and steel always remains for metal detectors to pick it up: eighteen privates and three officers, a captain, a lieutenant and a sub-lieutenant. The officers wear bespoke boots and are on average ten centimetres taller than their men. Dog tags, the number 228, which is the number of the regimental corps, clipped in brass to collar flaps, stripes sewn on the forearms and shoulders of the first three skeletons, there is absolutely no doubt: here lie Gramont, Fournier, Imbert and their men.