the sun was already sweltering. Packed into their foxholes, their necks protected by their packs, Tuberge’s group was sweating as much from fear as heat. The corpses of the cow and the priest had disappeared. In their wake drifted dead branches, a boater, and a cutter with a smashed gunwale. Palfy raised his helmet on the tip of a bayonet, but no one shot at it and he crawled gingerly out of the foxhole. On the far side of the canal, in the deserted meadow, the wind was bending the tall grass.
‘Tuberge,’ he called.
Nothing.
‘Maybe he’s been blown to bits,’ someone said with unconcealed joy.
‘I’d hate to miss that,’ Picallon said, crawling towards the sergeant’s shelter.
There was no one in the shelter but it was piled high with tinned food, wine and ammunition. On a plank Tuberge had pinned a photo of a donkey with an erection sodomising an enormous Hindu woman.
‘They’ve cleared off!’ Picallon shouted.
‘Try and get hold of the command post.’
The seminarian disappeared down the trench. He returned two minutes later.
‘Scarpered! With the 75.’
The 75’s disappearance was no news to anyone. Ever since war had been declared the self-propelled field gun, commanded by a reservist officer cadet, seemed to have had as its principal objective staying out of sight of the enemy. With three shells it could have silenced their mortars, but that would have meant risking an artillery piece destined to feature in a museum with a caption that read: ‘75mm cannon, having succeeded throughout the war of 1939–40 in not aggravating relations – already very bad at that time – between Albert Lebrun’s France and Adolf Hitler’s Germany’.
‘We’re buggered!’ Noël, a railway worker who was always depressed, said. ‘`We’ll have to surrender. Who’s got something white we can wave?’
‘Not on your life,’ said Pastoureau. ‘The Krauts don’t take prisoners. If I have to die either way, I’m for scarpering too. But who’s going to take command?’
‘You, Palfy, you’re the oldest!’ Joël Tambourin, a Breton, declared.
‘All right,’ Palfy said, having expected the nomination. ‘Jean will be my NCO.’
‘What’s happening?’ Picallon called from his hole. ‘What are we doing?’
‘Palfy’s taken over command!’ Tambourin yelled back with the joy of a man who had been liberated. ‘We’ve got a chief!’
Palfy smiled and murmured, ‘The frogs need their prince.’
Jean crawled across open ground to the next foxhole. For some incomprehensible reason, the Germans were holding their fire. The other group was dug in about twenty metres away. Jean hailed them. Getting no answer and tired of crawling, he got to his feet, ran and jumped into the hole: into a tangle of pulverised heads and crushed faces, of men whose spilt guts were already attracting flies. Two, possibly three mortars had fallen directly into the shelter and Jean found himself floundering in a pulp of blood, shredded flesh, and pieces of bone. His right boot finished the job of crushing a man’s chest. As he pulled it free, he pulled white ribs away with it and squashed the heart, from which thick black blood trickled. A ghastly nausea gripped him, and his whole body seemed to turn over in an excruciating pain that affected his arms and legs, as if his own life was being dragged out of him by giant pincers. He vomited not just the hunk of bread and corned beef he had eaten during the night, but all the food he had ever eaten, all his innards, his blood, his saliva, his snot. Intolerable throbbing drilled into his temples as he shut his eyes and clawed at the parapet to try to get out of the hole and flee the horror. Standing up, casting all caution to the winds, he wanted to run but collapsed, his foot caught in a length of someone’s guts. A machine-gun volley rattled over his head and his mouth was filled with earth.
‘Crawl, you bloody idiot!’ Palfy shouted.
Jean disentangled his foot and, green and trembling, let himself drop into the foxhole, where Palfy broke his fall.
‘Well …? Oh, I see. Right.’
Palfy in turn crept to the nearest position in the opposite direction, which was better protected by a parapet, but there the men had decamped, abandoning kit and ammunition. Another machine-gun volley punctuated his return.
‘Nothing for it but to do the same.’
‘Forget it. I’m not moving,’ Boucharon said. ‘All things considered, I’m all right here. Demob!’
‘I’m going,’ Palfy said. ‘If I make it to Picallon I’ll cover you.’
He climbed out. The enemy machine gun fired, kicking up dry sprays of earth around him, but he reached Picallon and set up the light machine gun.
‘Doesn’t fill me with joy,’ Noël said.
‘You’d have to be mad!’ Boucharon added.
‘Would it fill you with joy if I get across?’ Jean asked.
‘Maybe.’
Jean got across. A bullet ricocheted and hit his heel, another holed his jacket.
‘Three of us! The holy trinity!’ Picallon said, laughing uproariously and helping Jean back to an upright position.
‘Your turn, Noël,’ Palfy called.
The machine gun scythed through Noël’s spine when he was halfway across. He did not even flinch, just fell with his face flat on the ground. His fingers untensed and slid away from his rifle. Tambourin, whose turn it was next, hesitated at the shelter’s edge, then scrambled forward, crawling level with the immobile body. Palfy’s light machine gun discharged a magazine over his head towards the invisible German machine gun, which responded with a volley of bullets that riddled the earthwork of Tuberge’s shelter just as Tambourin was sliding into it. Palfy caught a dead man in his arms. He placed him in the bottom of the foxhole and sat him up. His face was already waxen, his lips pulled back to reveal his gums.
‘Palfy?’ Boucharon called from the shelter.
‘Yes.’
‘What happened to Tambourin?’
‘You want to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘Dead.’
‘In that case, all things considered, I’m staying put. They’re not cannibals, the Germans, after all. Demob!’
‘Please yourself!’
And so Boucharon, who had been expecting to throw away his uniform that day, kept it for another five years. On the other hand, he travelled and got to know the camps of Poland, Silesia and Württemberg where, working as a farmhand, he impregnated the wife of a farmer who was freezing at Stalingrad. Not the worst life he might have had, as he admitted, free of worries, his board guaranteed, and plenty of available women. He talked about it for the rest of his life after he got back to his family in Creuse, over whom the war had passed without a trace. From time to time, he still roared,
