But what is one to do with the others, the apparently unharmed? What mausoleum, for example, would be suitable for young Etienne Leboeuf, who took part in — perhaps I should say sat out, the way we sit out a storm that overtakes us in the open — almost every campaign behind that scar of trenches and barbed wire between the coast of my fatherland and the Swiss border without getting so much as a scratch, and changed his soldier’s tunic for the same grey peasant’s smock that he had taken off in the summer of 1914 like so many, millions, to obey the order of the generals, the ministers and the posters on the market square, where that word was suddenly there, unattainable and virginal, not yet pierced by definitions or my own breathless memories: “Guerre…”
Etienne Leboeuf, twenty-four, with his brown curls and his blue eyes and a blunt, touching, turned-up nose above his eternally scabby lips; Etienne Leboeuf, whose small, compact frame was indeed slightly reminiscent of a bull calf, and in whose eyes something of the passivity of calves shone; Etienne Leboeuf, who never spoke a word about the war and was not very talkative anyway — I imagine him in the trench with the stubborn passivity of a bull calf sheltering under a tree during a storm. Not realizing the risk it is running, it stands there rubbing against the trunk, apparently unmoved by even the most powerful lightning or the most violent thunderclaps; it blinks, shakes its head, waves its tail and flaps its ears to keep the rain off. I think of what my brother, equally tight-lipped, told me very occasionally, about the most silent death you could witness in the trenches, when the forager with his tins of provisions for the men in a forward post nearby slipped off one of the duckboards and found himself in the sucking mud of a crater full of quicksand — the silent conflict of someone who knows that if he dares call out he will attract the attention of the enemy and endanger not only himself but especially his mates, and at the same time feels himself sinking, and every swing of his trunk or arms in order to free himself gives the mud the opportunity to suck him down even deeper. “All we could do was listen,” said my brother, “grinding our teeth, crying, cursing under our breath, I experienced it at least three times or so, once so close I could hear the lad breathe, the doggedness with which at the last he grabbed the mess tins and the soup tins in his vain attempts to gain a hold — I can still hear the tin of the lids and handles tapping as he pulled our food basket towards him, the breath in his nose, more hectic and violent as the situation became more acute and he tried to scoop away the mush, but with every gesture simply hastened his end. My little gazelle,” said my brother, “I actually prayed then, dammit — and the restless breathing, the cough and the retching at the first gulp of mud in the throat, and the last, almost disappointed sigh before the brown goo reached his lips and nostrils, and the pool closed over him. I don’t know how many met their end through stupid accidents and not even through the bombs.”
Etienne Leboeuf never drowned in the mud, rather the reverse: it is his small, compact body, the body of a bull calf, which sucked up the mud into itself. I imagine him in the trench during a howitzer attack, passively silent, pressed against the wall of his hiding place, under the rattling corrugated iron which makes only a thin division between his squat figure and the hell above his head. Etienne Leboeuf must have seen pagodas of clods of earth, the short-lived Maya temples of earth and old corpses, tree trunks and roof tiles and foundations and cadavers that rose up where the projectiles landed and exploded with a force that no one could imagine, not even Etienne Leboeuf himself, who, passive as a calf during a storm, sat out the tempest, crouched in his hollow in the ground, and did not move, just squeezed his eyes against the seething earth or the splodges of intestine of the man — the only incident Etienne Leboeuf ever talked about — whom he literally saw blown to pieces next to him.
Etienne Leboeuf counted himself lucky when my uncle took him on as a hand on the farm after the war, excited as we were about anyone who still had all his organs, and he was grateful to my uncle that, unlike lots of other farmers, he didn’t worry when he sometimes took off during threshing or when one of the horses was being shod with chilly hammer blows — sometimes, during the food break, outside at the long table during the harvest, Etienne Leboeuf would drop his knife or spoon onto his plate and run to the barn, during churning or the beating of the threshing machine in which the stalks were ground up. He left everything behind and disappeared for a few hours. Who will point the finger at the girls, the young widows, the others, all those women, who eventually found out where he hid and strolled furtively across the farmyard to the hayloft, climbed the ladder and only had to see the blanket of dry grass under which the lad had hidden shivering under the juddering that seized his limbs, the tremors with which the war, his war, offered itself in vain to his memory, wanted to rid itself of his tissue and blood vessels to be finally born in language — the flesh that weeps and trembles before the word, but the word that cannot deal with that quaking fear.
Who will speak ill of the women who stripped Etienne Leboeuf from the hay like a newborn infant from its membranes, and took his head in their hands, close to their sultry bosoms, and cradled him, and stroked his forehead, and kissed his turned-up nose, and at the same time ran a hand over his belly and unbuttoned his fly to knead his sex until it was purple and throbbed in their palms, and pulled up their skirts and sat astride him in order to rock the deaf-and-dumb wound in his body to sleep in themselves — Etienne Leboeuf, who fed on sex like an infant on its mother’s milk. Who knows how many times his life was saved by copulating, in the barn, behind the fence or in a stall where a girl perhaps found him hiccupping with fear under the limbs of a cow, half slumped on the milking stool, fingers frozen round the udder? It happened to me more than once that I quietly retraced my steps because in the dark, under the low beams among the cattle, I heard stammering, groaning, the whispering voice of the woman who pulled his trousers down over his buttocks there against the feeding trough and with her hand took him inside her — and who knows in how many spots, hidden or not, furtive or not, the same thing happened? Countless times probably, the crucifixes or holy water fonts merrily bouncing along on their nails in the wooden attic wall with the pounding head end of the bed beneath, on which one body found protection in another body, the dance of two terrified monkeys.
*
My brother said later: the brothels are doing even better business than during the war — the whore was the last refuge for the man without a leg or hands, or the dribbling Cyclops who was once the best-looking man in the street. Who will deny him the consolation of knowing himself squeezed by warm, wet flesh, and dare to find it ridiculous that the poor man grasps the all in all far more divine trembling before his glands empty, and seizes the short moment of oblivion, as gratefully as Socrates his cup of hemlock? I know what I’m talking about, in that respect I have not fought without glory — there should be monuments for them, for the countless men like Etienne Leboeuf and their consolers, Etienne Leboeuf who, as it happens, later married one of his mistresses and in his fear fertilized her no less than nine times. I still see him coming out of church on Sunday in the village where his family lived, his wife on his arm and surrounded by his family: girls who look like their mother and sons with the same squat body, in their eyes the same innocent calf’s melancholy as their father, around whom they throng to wheedle a few cents for sweets — and Etienne Leboeuf himself, who at that moment sees me standing under the lime trees in the church square and greets me shyly from behind his bastion of children: still just as taciturn, but calmer, because safe.