Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Robert Merle
From Weekend at Dunkirk (1949)
Translated by K. Rebillon-Lambley
“That’s what war is,” thought Maillat once more. In peacetime, life is harmonious, well ordered. You meet the same people, you see them again, you lose sight of them, then run into them once more. The course of events develops harmoniously as in a classical tragedy, with a climax and an ending. But in times of war everything is haphazard, without connection, without sequence, without coherence.
***
The streets, still full of flying dust from the ruined buildings, were swarming with soldiers walking or running in all directions. Once more in the midst of the crowd, Maillat immediately felt small, played out, anonymous. It was as if he had become a man in khaki among men in khaki, those men whose lot it was to kill and be killed.
***
Maillat suddenly remembered a newsreel he had seen in a movie before the war. On the screen a journalist was interviewing the last survivor of the heavy cavalry of Reichshoffen. He had been a little old man, too, but incredibly smaller and older than the man he had just seen. He was so wrinkled, so decrepit, so shaky, so frail that it was really a miracle that he could still stand on his legs. He had told the story of the famous charge. “All day long…we had been waiting…in the hopfields…So we waited…in the hopfields…and then brave General Michel shouted: ‘Char-arge!…Char-arge!’…and we charged…into the hopfields!…” The little old man got wildly excited. He had sawed the air jerkily and comically with his right hand as if he still held a saber in it. He got so excited that you were afraid he would suddenly break to pieces, crumble into dust before your eyes. He shouted: “Char-arge! Char-arge!” at the top of his voice, an extraordinarily weak little voice. He saw himself in his fine glittering cuirass once more, with drawn sword, in all the glory of his twenty years. They were still real things to him, the famous charge, the 1870 war, Napoleon III, the Ems dispatch, the humiliation of Sedan. But to him only. The movie theater rocked with laughter. “A whole epoch!” thought Maillat, “all the burning questions of seventy years ago! And how high feeling ran then! What hatred, what hopes, what falsehood! And what folly!” And now it was all ended! Completely ended! It had ceased to have any meaning. Perhaps it never had any! It was merely the baseless fabric of a vision. Just as the 1914-18 war was, and the present war would soon be, and all the previous wars, and all the wars to come.
***
He explained to Atkins that, in France, before a man condemned to death is led to the scaffold, he is given a cigarette and a glass of rum. He explained this calmly, without hurry. His throat was a little dry, but he felt perfectly cool.
“A glass of rum,” said Atkins. “I should think the poor devil would need it.”
“I am calm,” thought Maillat, “I am perfectly calm. You poor fool,” he added at once, “here you are falling for their heroics now! What does it matter whether you’re brave or a coward? And to whom?”
“We’ve nothing like that in England,” said Atkins. “The French are more humane than us.”
And the Stukas never for a minute stopped circling over their heads!
“The most humane thing, when all’s said and done, is not to kill anyone,” said Maillat.
***
Maillat took off his life-belt, threw it on the sand, took a few steps, with his eyes fixed on the ship. Something white at his feet attracted his attention. It occurred to him that this was what he had stumbled against when he came out of the water just now. It was the lower part of a human body, completely naked, and severed just above the waistline. The trunk and the head must have fallen elsewhere, perhaps in the sea. This fragment of a man sprawled there, obscene and anonymous, the long, muscular legs stretched out in a natural posture, as if resting. Maillat stood motionless, gazing at it. It was chiefly the abdomen that held his attention. Its white skin, relaxed muscles, and curving flanks still seemed to be part of a living man below the frightful wound. Maillat stooped down and laid his hand on it. It was still warm. Some soldiers who were passing saw his gesture. One of them turned round and shouted an on obscenity. Maillat heard their laughter die away in the distance.
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