Trechos de Poilu - World War I Notebooks (1978), de Louis Barthas.
The End of the Nightmare: August 11, 1918-February 14, 1919
After signing in on the official register - the true cogwheel of militarism - I went to the garrison, which was the headquarters of the three regiments of infantrymen of which the city of Guingamp was so proud.
The barracks was reserved for the future heroes of the conscript class of 1920, which was finishing up its apprenticeship in the noble profession of arms. As for us, the graybeards, the leather-skins, the tough old guys of every shade and hue, we had to be content being housed in what had been the stables for remounts. There were no more than a half-dozen stallions still there - the care of which required the presence of three or four dozen embusqués.
I didn't receive a very warm welcome at the office. It seemed that I was arriving three days late. I had left home the day after my convalescence leave had expired. But there were several days which the dictator Clemenceau, to get the sick and the wounded back to the front lines more quickly, had decreed that any delays in travel would henceforth be included in the home leave or convalescence.
I didn't know that. But no one is allowed to be ignorant of the law, even a decree. So they told me that I would be called before the generalissimo of all the troops in Guingamp, who would decide whether or not I'd be considered a deserter!
Next day I was sent to the barracks for the obligatory medical exam. Despite a gruff exterior and sour manner, the major [medical officer] harbored a kind heart and did everything in his power to help the poilus. Observing my skinny body, my haggard features, the bags under my eyes, and learning that I'd been evacuated for the first time in four years, he said to me, "Good man! Go get your gear, you're coming to the infirmary, you'll help work in the garden."
The next day I began my peaceful duties as assistant gardener, watering the cabbages and lettuce, pulling up potatoes, all kinds of things which appealed much more to my pacifist temperament than handling a rifle, grenades, and other homicidal devices.
- - -
I left that very evening. This time passing through Paris I visited the Palais des Invalides, but I couldn't see the red marble tomb of that great battler Napoleon I because it was covered with sandbags to protect it from enemy bombs.
That would have been quite a paradox, if the murderer who had never suffered a scratch during more than a hundred battles would have been touched by a piece of metal, a century later, in his coffin.
- - -
That September 8, the same day I got back from home leave, along with thirty corporals, sergeants, and adjutants, I took the train to Vitré.
At Saint-Brieuc, the station crew told us there was a forty-minute stop. I shared my compartment with two corporals whose names I've forgotten.
- - -
Where would our knapsacks, canteens, and weapons have gotten to?
We would have been in a fine mess.
At nine in the evening we showed up at La Trémoille barracks, where our arrival took the guard detail completely by surprise and disturbed their sleep.
The teams of instructors weren't supposed to arrive until the next day. As a result, we didn't get a very warm welcome. We had to skip supper, and slept on beds without mattresses. We consoled ourselves with the thought that we'd seen plenty of those.
The day after, [...] from dawn to twilight, we were either in the barracks courtyard or snaking our way across the training field, with barely an hour of rest, hardly enough time to wolf down something to eat, write a letter, look at a newspaper - all at full gallop.
We spent hours doing to-the-left-march, right-face, showing off for a boss who was never satisfied with how smartly we clicked our heels, marching past him in full salute twenty times in a row, while he shouted commands to us so loudly as to burst a vein in his neck.
- - -
Every day there were choral sessions, and we sang going to and from the training field. It was forced cheerfulness. We had two priests with us who sang La Madelon, Margoton, La Boulangère so often as to give you a headache.
Vitré is a city of about ten thousand inhabitants. The people are Bretons because they're part of Brittany. But they aren't Breton in their customs or their language.
They speak only French. And it would be a pretty good French if they didn't say, for example, "Vitren" for "Vitré," "marchen" for "marché," "Sévignen" for "Sévigné," etc., for every word ending in "é." Right in the city is the ancient, admirably conserved castle of the Seigneur de la Trémoille, the big brawler whom Vitré holds dear to its heart. At the base of this castle flows the Vilaine river, which deserves its name [vilain: ugly, nasty]. It's not pretty to look at, with its muddy water, dirtied, they say, by factories located upstream.
Vitré's local celebrity is Madame de Sévigné, who lived in the Château des Roches-Noires, a few kilometers outside town, a place of excursion and even pilgrimage for any traveler passing by.
In the public garden at Vitré they've raised a statue of Madame de Sévigné. She's shown with an inoffensive pen in her hand. I much prefer that to a brandished sword, battle-ax, or rifle.
One day our officers were nice enough to drive us to the former Château des Roches-Noires. We could see the writing room of the person who made this place famous. Everything was exactly the same as she left it. In one corner, her tiny wooden shoes were there to show how small her feet were. In the park there was a sort of grotto which produced unexpected echoes. I shouted "Vive la paix!"
One afternoon we were driven to the theater of Vitré, not to see a performance but to hear a speech about American war aid, so as to boost our morale which risked being sapped by the pacifist or, as they called it, defeatist, campaign which was rife at this time.
So here was this young officer, embusqué, this charlatan of morale, pouring into our ears fantastic numbers of cannon, airplanes, tanks, Yankees armed to the teeth flooding in. At the end of each tirade, to conclude it, he cried out two or three times, "C'est formidable!"
First came the smiles, then the muffled laughter, then the guffaws bursting forth irreverently. The officers had a hard time keeping a straight face, and the successor to de la Trémoille himself, the military governor of Vitré, chewed on his big gray mustaches. At the end, the speaker himself was caught up in the laughter which rocked the hall, and the conference ended in the midst of general hilarity. The funniest thing was that this emissary of Clemenceau had no idea about the reason for this hilarity and continued to punctuate each of his sentences, full of conviction, with "C'est formidable!"
- - -
1918. Armistice! Liberation!
Meanwhile the great drama was reaching its conclusion. Alone against twenty nations baying after her in a fantastic clamor, Germany, so proud in 1914, now on its knees, asked for mercy, asked for armistice.
But this way of fleeing the war didn't appeal to the striped sleeves, who didn't have their fill of crosses, medals, stars, stripes, ribbons, honors and glories.
For these folks, war had to end with total disaster for the German army, against which Jena, Waterloo, and Sedan would be mere skirmishes. Thousands of captured cannon, hundreds of thousands of captured Boches, shattered enemy forces streaming back across the Rhine bridges, pursued with bayonets at their backs by our soldiers, our regiments entering the great cities beyond the Rhine, flags fluttering, bands playing - here was the apotheosis dreamed of not only by our great warriors but also by the government, almost all the press, all the embusqués, and, back in the rear, all those who had nothing more to lose, or who had more to gain by continuing the war.
- - -
During this time, in an orgy of murder, bloodletting, and burning, the whole front was in flames, from Ypres to Belfort. Without exception, all the regiments were thrown into the assault on German machine guns.
The German armies bent back on all the points of contact, without letting their line be broken, and their retreat didn't turn into a rout.
They had to cede the floor to the diplomats. But I'm not going to pretend to write history here, by recounting the dramatic, agonizing twists and turns which led to the signing of the Armistice, November 11, 1918, at five in the morning.
- - -
It was noon when the news reached us in the Vitré barracks. There wasn't a single soldier left in the rooms. It was a devilish stampede down the corridors and down to the police station, where they had just posted a telegram announcing, in two laconic lines, the deliverance of millions of men, the end of their tortures, the imminent return to civilized life.
How many times had we thought about this blessed day, which so many did not live to see.
- - -
We stood there looking at each other, mute and stupid.
But we were called back to reality by the cries of Rassemblement! and the whistle blasts of the adjutants on duty, to head out for exercises as usual.
What, to exercises? On such a solemn day, which will be unforgettable in future centuries - that was a joke. Grumbling, we set out for the training field, and the next day, too. Finally some striped-sleeve type, less stupid than the others, put an end to these exercises which had lost their purpose.
- - -
I soon obtained a leave of fifty days - as a barrelmaker - and returned to duty at the garrison on 10 January 1919.
Passing through Paris, I visited the Jardin des Plantes and walked past the Opéra and the Louvre.
One more month separated me from my liberation. I spent it standing guard at the 48th Regiment's barracks [at Guingamp] and at a hospital where German prisoners from all over the region were being cared for.
They were installed by themselves in two big tents at the end of the hospital's garden. If you were too sick, you died, and there's one less Boche.
- - -
Finally my long-awaited day arrived: February 14, 1919.
That day, at Narbonne, after multiple formalities imposed upon the demobilized and visits from one office to another, a desk-bound adjutant handed me my discharge papers with the words, as long awaited as the Messiah, "Go, you're free."
I was free, after fifty-four months of slavery! I was finally escaping from the claws of militarism, to which I swore such a ferocious hatred.
I have sought to inculcate this hatred in my children, my friends, my neighbors. I will tell them that the fatherland, glory, military honor, laurels - all are only vain words, destined to mask what is frighteningly horrible, ugly, and cruel about war.
- - -
They lied when they said that we, the poilus, wanted to continue the war in order to avenge the dead, so that our sacrifices would not be useless.
- - -
Victory has made us forget everything, absolve everything.
- - -
In the villages they're already talking about raising monuments of glory, of apotheosis, to the victims of the big butchery, to those, as the phony patriots say, who "have voluntarily made the sacrifice of their lives," as if those unfortunate ones could have chosen to do otherwise.
- - -
Returned to the bosom of my family after the nightmare years, I taste the joy of life, or rather of new life. I feel tender happiness about things which, before, I didn't pay attention to: sitting at home, at my table, lying in my bed, putting off sleep so I can hear the wind hitting the shutters, rustling the nearby plane trees, hearing the rain strike the windows, looking at a starry, serene, silent night or, on a dark, moonless night, thinking about similar nights spent up there...
Often I think about my many comrades fallen by my side. I heard their curses against the war and its authors, the revolt of their whole beings against their tragic fate, against their murder. And I, as a survivor, believe that I am inspired by their will to struggle without cease-fire nor mercy, to my last breath, for the idea of peace and human fraternity.
Mais:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7K1yqCuTgg
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrWPsj6fVbeXlwbafa8GYHgEenDH9MmTF
http://www.historyguide.org/europe/valery.html
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC4siPTFsziRvpzLxHT8Pjhh7VWBbQEai
The End of the Nightmare: August 11, 1918-February 14, 1919After signing in on the official register - the true cogwheel of militarism - I went to the garrison, which was the headquarters of the three regiments of infantrymen of which the city of Guingamp was so proud.
The barracks was reserved for the future heroes of the conscript class of 1920, which was finishing up its apprenticeship in the noble profession of arms. As for us, the graybeards, the leather-skins, the tough old guys of every shade and hue, we had to be content being housed in what had been the stables for remounts. There were no more than a half-dozen stallions still there - the care of which required the presence of three or four dozen embusqués.
I didn't receive a very warm welcome at the office. It seemed that I was arriving three days late. I had left home the day after my convalescence leave had expired. But there were several days which the dictator Clemenceau, to get the sick and the wounded back to the front lines more quickly, had decreed that any delays in travel would henceforth be included in the home leave or convalescence.
I didn't know that. But no one is allowed to be ignorant of the law, even a decree. So they told me that I would be called before the generalissimo of all the troops in Guingamp, who would decide whether or not I'd be considered a deserter!
Next day I was sent to the barracks for the obligatory medical exam. Despite a gruff exterior and sour manner, the major [medical officer] harbored a kind heart and did everything in his power to help the poilus. Observing my skinny body, my haggard features, the bags under my eyes, and learning that I'd been evacuated for the first time in four years, he said to me, "Good man! Go get your gear, you're coming to the infirmary, you'll help work in the garden."
The next day I began my peaceful duties as assistant gardener, watering the cabbages and lettuce, pulling up potatoes, all kinds of things which appealed much more to my pacifist temperament than handling a rifle, grenades, and other homicidal devices.
- - -
I left that very evening. This time passing through Paris I visited the Palais des Invalides, but I couldn't see the red marble tomb of that great battler Napoleon I because it was covered with sandbags to protect it from enemy bombs.
That would have been quite a paradox, if the murderer who had never suffered a scratch during more than a hundred battles would have been touched by a piece of metal, a century later, in his coffin.
- - -
That September 8, the same day I got back from home leave, along with thirty corporals, sergeants, and adjutants, I took the train to Vitré.
At Saint-Brieuc, the station crew told us there was a forty-minute stop. I shared my compartment with two corporals whose names I've forgotten.
- - -
Where would our knapsacks, canteens, and weapons have gotten to?
We would have been in a fine mess.
At nine in the evening we showed up at La Trémoille barracks, where our arrival took the guard detail completely by surprise and disturbed their sleep.
The teams of instructors weren't supposed to arrive until the next day. As a result, we didn't get a very warm welcome. We had to skip supper, and slept on beds without mattresses. We consoled ourselves with the thought that we'd seen plenty of those.
The day after, [...] from dawn to twilight, we were either in the barracks courtyard or snaking our way across the training field, with barely an hour of rest, hardly enough time to wolf down something to eat, write a letter, look at a newspaper - all at full gallop.
We spent hours doing to-the-left-march, right-face, showing off for a boss who was never satisfied with how smartly we clicked our heels, marching past him in full salute twenty times in a row, while he shouted commands to us so loudly as to burst a vein in his neck.
- - -
Every day there were choral sessions, and we sang going to and from the training field. It was forced cheerfulness. We had two priests with us who sang La Madelon, Margoton, La Boulangère so often as to give you a headache.
Vitré is a city of about ten thousand inhabitants. The people are Bretons because they're part of Brittany. But they aren't Breton in their customs or their language.
They speak only French. And it would be a pretty good French if they didn't say, for example, "Vitren" for "Vitré," "marchen" for "marché," "Sévignen" for "Sévigné," etc., for every word ending in "é." Right in the city is the ancient, admirably conserved castle of the Seigneur de la Trémoille, the big brawler whom Vitré holds dear to its heart. At the base of this castle flows the Vilaine river, which deserves its name [vilain: ugly, nasty]. It's not pretty to look at, with its muddy water, dirtied, they say, by factories located upstream.
Vitré's local celebrity is Madame de Sévigné, who lived in the Château des Roches-Noires, a few kilometers outside town, a place of excursion and even pilgrimage for any traveler passing by.
In the public garden at Vitré they've raised a statue of Madame de Sévigné. She's shown with an inoffensive pen in her hand. I much prefer that to a brandished sword, battle-ax, or rifle.
One day our officers were nice enough to drive us to the former Château des Roches-Noires. We could see the writing room of the person who made this place famous. Everything was exactly the same as she left it. In one corner, her tiny wooden shoes were there to show how small her feet were. In the park there was a sort of grotto which produced unexpected echoes. I shouted "Vive la paix!"
One afternoon we were driven to the theater of Vitré, not to see a performance but to hear a speech about American war aid, so as to boost our morale which risked being sapped by the pacifist or, as they called it, defeatist, campaign which was rife at this time.
So here was this young officer, embusqué, this charlatan of morale, pouring into our ears fantastic numbers of cannon, airplanes, tanks, Yankees armed to the teeth flooding in. At the end of each tirade, to conclude it, he cried out two or three times, "C'est formidable!"
First came the smiles, then the muffled laughter, then the guffaws bursting forth irreverently. The officers had a hard time keeping a straight face, and the successor to de la Trémoille himself, the military governor of Vitré, chewed on his big gray mustaches. At the end, the speaker himself was caught up in the laughter which rocked the hall, and the conference ended in the midst of general hilarity. The funniest thing was that this emissary of Clemenceau had no idea about the reason for this hilarity and continued to punctuate each of his sentences, full of conviction, with "C'est formidable!"
- - -
1918. Armistice! Liberation!
Meanwhile the great drama was reaching its conclusion. Alone against twenty nations baying after her in a fantastic clamor, Germany, so proud in 1914, now on its knees, asked for mercy, asked for armistice.
But this way of fleeing the war didn't appeal to the striped sleeves, who didn't have their fill of crosses, medals, stars, stripes, ribbons, honors and glories.
For these folks, war had to end with total disaster for the German army, against which Jena, Waterloo, and Sedan would be mere skirmishes. Thousands of captured cannon, hundreds of thousands of captured Boches, shattered enemy forces streaming back across the Rhine bridges, pursued with bayonets at their backs by our soldiers, our regiments entering the great cities beyond the Rhine, flags fluttering, bands playing - here was the apotheosis dreamed of not only by our great warriors but also by the government, almost all the press, all the embusqués, and, back in the rear, all those who had nothing more to lose, or who had more to gain by continuing the war.
- - -
During this time, in an orgy of murder, bloodletting, and burning, the whole front was in flames, from Ypres to Belfort. Without exception, all the regiments were thrown into the assault on German machine guns.
The German armies bent back on all the points of contact, without letting their line be broken, and their retreat didn't turn into a rout.
They had to cede the floor to the diplomats. But I'm not going to pretend to write history here, by recounting the dramatic, agonizing twists and turns which led to the signing of the Armistice, November 11, 1918, at five in the morning.
- - -
It was noon when the news reached us in the Vitré barracks. There wasn't a single soldier left in the rooms. It was a devilish stampede down the corridors and down to the police station, where they had just posted a telegram announcing, in two laconic lines, the deliverance of millions of men, the end of their tortures, the imminent return to civilized life.
How many times had we thought about this blessed day, which so many did not live to see.
- - -
We stood there looking at each other, mute and stupid.
But we were called back to reality by the cries of Rassemblement! and the whistle blasts of the adjutants on duty, to head out for exercises as usual.
What, to exercises? On such a solemn day, which will be unforgettable in future centuries - that was a joke. Grumbling, we set out for the training field, and the next day, too. Finally some striped-sleeve type, less stupid than the others, put an end to these exercises which had lost their purpose.
- - -
I soon obtained a leave of fifty days - as a barrelmaker - and returned to duty at the garrison on 10 January 1919.
Passing through Paris, I visited the Jardin des Plantes and walked past the Opéra and the Louvre.
One more month separated me from my liberation. I spent it standing guard at the 48th Regiment's barracks [at Guingamp] and at a hospital where German prisoners from all over the region were being cared for.
They were installed by themselves in two big tents at the end of the hospital's garden. If you were too sick, you died, and there's one less Boche.
- - -
Finally my long-awaited day arrived: February 14, 1919.
That day, at Narbonne, after multiple formalities imposed upon the demobilized and visits from one office to another, a desk-bound adjutant handed me my discharge papers with the words, as long awaited as the Messiah, "Go, you're free."
I was free, after fifty-four months of slavery! I was finally escaping from the claws of militarism, to which I swore such a ferocious hatred.
I have sought to inculcate this hatred in my children, my friends, my neighbors. I will tell them that the fatherland, glory, military honor, laurels - all are only vain words, destined to mask what is frighteningly horrible, ugly, and cruel about war.
- - -
They lied when they said that we, the poilus, wanted to continue the war in order to avenge the dead, so that our sacrifices would not be useless.
- - -
Victory has made us forget everything, absolve everything.
- - -
In the villages they're already talking about raising monuments of glory, of apotheosis, to the victims of the big butchery, to those, as the phony patriots say, who "have voluntarily made the sacrifice of their lives," as if those unfortunate ones could have chosen to do otherwise.
- - -
Returned to the bosom of my family after the nightmare years, I taste the joy of life, or rather of new life. I feel tender happiness about things which, before, I didn't pay attention to: sitting at home, at my table, lying in my bed, putting off sleep so I can hear the wind hitting the shutters, rustling the nearby plane trees, hearing the rain strike the windows, looking at a starry, serene, silent night or, on a dark, moonless night, thinking about similar nights spent up there...
Often I think about my many comrades fallen by my side. I heard their curses against the war and its authors, the revolt of their whole beings against their tragic fate, against their murder. And I, as a survivor, believe that I am inspired by their will to struggle without cease-fire nor mercy, to my last breath, for the idea of peace and human fraternity.
Mais:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7K1yqCuTgg
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrWPsj6fVbeXlwbafa8GYHgEenDH9MmTF
http://www.historyguide.org/europe/valery.html
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC4siPTFsziRvpzLxHT8Pjhh7VWBbQEai
