‘Another round!’ says Max. ‘On me.’
But let us not forget the real culprit, that straw boater, everything that preceded those few days during which it was waved this way and that under a burning sun, union sacrée, long live France, long live Poincaré, long live the Kaiser, war’s a novelty, a joy, the sacrifice made for one’s country, and last Tuesday morning in the Salle Gaveau Bishop Bolo gave some advice to a thousand young Frenchwomen on how to choose a husband, a long engagement is essential for you to get to know one another, for a fiancé is the most beguiling kind of liar, you will need time to get him trained, separation and the war are blessings in disguise, in the big stores, the girls who get paid three francs a day for a fifteen-hour day demand more chairs.
It will encourage laziness, say the directors, a sordid business having something like that brought up, the strike has been broken, and from Biskra, Monsieur Chiarelli, the distinguished entomologist, has sent us two splendid photographs of scorpions, one of a mother no doubt panic-stricken devouring her young, and one of an adult male devouring another, with the last three joints of the tail and the poisonous sting sticking out of the mouth of the victor.
For the dragoons at Monfaubert there are eight targets, eight dove-grey dreams as splendid as myths, each with its own great wings, a span of fourteen metres secured by wires finer than the guys of the finest sailing boats, forty square metres of aerofoil, a stream-lined fuselage made of canvas and light wooden struts, a stubby vertical mast between the engine and the pilot, a complex system of cables supporting wings (conceived and designed by observing the flight of a zanonia seed) with a span of fourteen centimetres, a perfectly rounded leading edge and a gracefully flowing trailing edge.
Igor Etrich, a first-rate engineer, multiplied the proportions of the outer shell by a hundred, added a pigeon-tail rear-end together with a six-cylinder in-line Mercedes engine, 120 horse-power, sweet dove-grey chargers, the century’s new weapon of the skies, the Taube, one of them dropped two small bombs on Paris on 13 August.
The cavalrymen charge these new replacements on behalf of all the cavalries in the whole wide world, aircraft, airplanes, also known as aeroplanes, ’planes, the monoplanes Hans looks after, though in civilian life he is a naval engineer, novelist and dreamer, the army had turned him into a private in the infantry but quickly reassigned him as chief air mechanic in the first days of the war when the skies are still relatively free, pilots climb to almost 2,000 metres singing a snatch of song behind their propellers and return to base with bullet holes in their wings and a few snippets of information about the enemy, they smell of hot oil, their faces and hands are as oily as their engines but they wear fleece jackets costing a thousand marks a throw, are billeted in a château, drink champagne as they discreetly compare genealogical notes.
Up there, the war is almost clean, some opponents are still at the stage of saluting each other, they don’t use parachutes, the dream of Icarus runs through their veins.
Marie-Thérèse almost fell off her bike twice, she had to lower the saddle, she wasn’t at all pleased, Hans told her you mustn’t have it too high, it’s the wind that does it, the wind resistance, so funny, I didn’t say anything and no one mentioned her little legs. After that Hans held her bike, one hand under the saddle and the other on the handlebars, Marie-Thérèse laughed, she was wearing trousers, apparently where she comes from women aren’t allowed to wear trousers except for riding a horse or a bike, but at home she never rode a bike, she laughed but she was trying it on, Hans had his hand under her saddle, and there was nothing I could say. She could blush at will, she knew how to make the most of her blushes, I’ve always been told I thought too much about love, Hans had shapely hands, smooth skin, every time I thought of it I’d tell myself that woman is going to find out what Hans’s skin tastes like, that hand has no business being under her saddle. People say that being jealous can make you fall in love, it made me feel awkward, when she looked at him I thought he seemed so conceited. One evening, on the main staircase in the Waldhaus, he was telling me all about cycling, he’d read that bicycles spelled death for book sales, because people spent so much time riding them, cycling two or three hours every day, which was time taken away from reading, it was a real threat, he stopped one floor too soon, I couldn’t keep it to myself, I said ‘this is only Marie-Thérèse’s floor’.
That sad-looking Frenchman with the big ears just now in the restaurant, Frenchmen stare at women a lot and just carry on talking to their companions, a woman like Marie-Thérèse would have got up.
Max knocks over the books on the table, returns the menu to the waiter, retrieves his coins and ring, empties his glass, the truth needs to be believed before it can be understood, the real culprit was the summer, the straw boaters we gaily tossed towards the enemy, the quick-tempered heat of that glorious summer when Jean Bouin ran the fearsome distance of nine kilometres seven hundred and twenty-one metres in thirty minutes, which was some going, we even hunted rats: identical hunting scenes on both sides of the front, rats hanging by their tails from wires strung between poles, the cook claimed he could make rat jam, we laughed, he’s a real card, the style they called Charm, said the cook, I remember it well, I was head sales assistant, the skirt fitted very closely over the hips, swelled out in the shape of a bell and reached down to the ground with a train at the back, scooped-out necklines with satin-stitch, go on, cook, tell us more, some rats are as big as 75 mm shells, the.75 is the expression in metallic form of the marvellous qualities of our race, flooding brings the rats out, they swim among us at knee level, the general said we had to stay in the water, the CO said, ‘Don’t knock your brains out over it’, and a voice piped up: ‘The bullets will do that for us.’ And on the role of the African infantry and the Moroccan cavalry one general would write one autumn day: ‘Use before winter.’
And sometimes there’s too much water, in one night at Neuville-Saint-Vaast, the trenches of both sides were flooded to the top, all the men climbed out and faced each other a hundred metres apart, and for hours and hours no one fired a gun, no one killed anybody, a wag said, ‘If it goes on like this, they’ll soon be building an Ark.’
At other times, much later on, there are men who don’t want to kill or die any more, but they die pleading, wetting their trousers, their comrades dragging them to the stake, others stink even more, they struggle, they have to be tied to a chair while they scream, the colonel said, like women.
Bastards! screams one of the condemned men, you go on and on killing — that’s why you’ll always be slaves, the chair tips over, lash that chair to the stake says the colonel, the officers are forced to put more and more men out of their misery, some mutineers have been hit by only three bullets and none of them well placed, an officer yells at the firing squad he commands, every man who shoots wide is a coward, you ought to be ashamed, look at him, he’s still moving.