Now and again from that sea of nameless faces a look lit up, clear as the shine on a drop of dew in the morning mist — the faint smile of a young man whose mouth, just under the sharply defined shadow of his cap, unexpectedly opened in the most radiant joy imaginable, or the rather worried-looking eye of a somewhat older man: his bushy eyebrow was raised momentarily, his head looked up automatically and he gave a resigned, almost imperceptible nod. Since then I know that a look can have fingers, and a whole hand if necessary. Over the years my memory has contracted around those two gazes that nestled briefly in mine; everything else around becomes vague and hazy, only the eyes don’t. They stare at me ever more sharply and compress a whole life into their stare. I had sons and lovers there, and in so many eyes was the daughter of fathers I have never known.
He drummed impatiently on the steering wheel and was about to hoot, but it occurred to him just in time that it was forbidden, and tugged on my coat to make me sit down again, but there was no point. We were half on the verge, half in the undergrowth. When I craned my neck to look over the nearest figures, I saw farther on, through the clouds of dust and the sunlight refracted in them, the contours of the ammunition lorries. They looked like slow mastodons with, between them, on and towed behind other lorries, towards the bed of the shallow valley out of which that stream of weapons and men was making its way, light and heavy artillery — it reminded one of the procession of an ancient people that bore its idols and statues of divinities out of its temples through the country, their fabulous animals, their steel Cyclopses.
“The herds of Mars,” I said, and thought it ridiculous myself.
He repeated that it would be better if I sat down, but I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that it was all these men who were dragging the chariots of destruction onward, by invisible cords over their shoulders, resigned and silent — all that could be heard was the crunch of footwear. The high road verges seemed to retreat from them, just as the sea had opened for the people of Moses, although they might just as well have been Pharaoh’s army, not suspecting that those earth banks could close again at any moment — but then he pulled so hard on my coat tails that I fell abruptly back into the car seat.
He glanced aside, gave me the grin full of reckless courage that needed only half his mouth to win me over to him for ever: “Didn’t mean to hurt you, ma biche, everything all right?” and put his foot down.
The peace that came over us when we turned into a side road in order to make a shortcut, the charm of the countryside the moment we drove just about 100 metres from that stream of people through rolling fields, grassland above which larks fell out of the sky and lapwings whooped, past houses where old people were selling newly harvested onions on benches against the wall under the grapevine — it was all unreal. Around the washing places on the market squares of the villages children stopped as we passed and gaped at us open-mouthed. With coarse brushes women scrubbed blue-white bleach over the thresholds of their houses. It was like a lucid dream, because almost nowhere did you see young men. The tissue of everyday life had holes in it. Ordinariness was walking around in rags but only we seemed to notice.
And sooner or later we saw from a distance that stream of figures shuffling past again — the same figures or different ones. The war created its own arterial pattern of road maps in the landscape, which coincided with the old ones where it was possible, but where necessary it carved new routes through the earth, with railway lines that branched like capillaries, temporary depots, junctions, assembly points, base camps. The fronts, if I had been able to see them from the air, must have looked like gaping, throbbing wounds, which from everywhere, over old roads and new, sucked in flesh and blood and fodder and explosives. And even when we found ourselves on deserted roads we could deduce from the grey-white dust on the hedges that a column must have passed through shortly before — sometimes it looked like a Christmas scene, a sugary, live postcard of snowy hedgerows, above which the sun was warming a new day.
He asked me if I was hungry yet, and I shook my head. We could see the plain in the distance, where the masses of people became less dense. The front was close by, the troops dispersed, set up temporary camps in meadows and beside country lanes. Again I saw, like the year before, when I had been to town with my mother, men stirring kettles that hung bubbling over campfires, and whole trees transformed into stationary galleons, with drying shirts and trousers on the masts, which the wind caught as if they were sails.
You could smell the odour of the fires, of the fat with which the saddlery was greased, you could hear the scraping of the curry-comb on the flanks of horses, and their snorting. Someone was playing the harmonica. Children were still shooting as swift as sticklebacks past the resting men.
Older boys watched with their hands in their pockets as the soldiers cleaned their rifles, fascinated as boys are by everything that opens on a hinge, clicks, switches and ejaculates. On their faces one could read regret. Their lower lips quivered with impatience because they were still too young to join the armies. The chaos that reigned there had only at first sight a festive air. The melodies were lifeless, the jokes dour. No one waved or lost themselves in teasing. Even the children were no longer curious, but worked the tents routinely, to the point of rudeness, to exchange an egg or a piece of bacon for some money or a jewel. The soldiers waved them away like flies. Above the treetops, the roads and the farmland hung the virtually continuous roar and thunder of the front; the sound was much less dull than at home. There was more texture, not to say architecture in the booming, which created invisible buildings in the heavens, domes, stone bubbles that immediately crumbled.
We left the hill country. Suddenly the frantic activity ceased and the plain was there, past the last board on the verge, repeating in raucous capitals the ban on hooting. The plain and its rows of trees, its slow processions of crowns. Its monk trees, its own parade of trunks. Beneath them clusters of men emerging from the crowds behind us, laden with backpack and blanket, helmet and rifle, on the way to relieve other troops. Somewhere out there, on the plain.
The plain that I no longer recognized, or only half, because it was no longer, or not completely, the plain where we used to come on excursions by coach with my uncle and the aunts, under the parasols of August, to the villages where we drank the idleness of summer from earthenware jugs, the bitter beer.
The villages with their towers, their sun-scorched squares, their ochre spires, which now seemed different villages, different towers; toy villages that had fallen out of the overfull toy box of a giant child while it had been lugging it across fields in boredom where old corn lay snapped over the earth, overgrown with grass tussocks and thistles. Roofs showed their skeletons, seemed to have rejected their tiles. Window shutters hung loose from the window frames in walls riddled with bullet holes. Somewhere there was a bluestone door frame still standing, there was something clownish, stoical about it, keeping up the appearance of a house in a heap of pulverized bricks out of which the beams stuck like bones. The battered houses, the towers from which a huge bird had pecked a piece, lay staring at each other across the wooded banks that had been largely shot to pieces like schoolchildren still panting after a skirmish, collar ripped loose, glasses trampled underfoot, sleeves torn at the seams — everyone was perplexed.