Journey to the End of the Night Read Free Page B

command post, to see if anyone else in our regiment had been killed on reconnaissance. There must be some good dodges, I said to myself, for getting taken prisoner ... Here and there in the fields a few puffs of smoke still clung to the ground.
    "Maybe they're all dead," I thought. "Seeing they refuse to understand anything whatsoever, the best solution would be for them all to get killed instantly ... The war would be over, and we'd go home ... Maybe we'd march across the Place Clichy in triumph ... Just one or two survivors ... In my dream ... Strapping good fellows marching behind the general, all the rest would be dead like the colonel ... Like Barousse ... like Vanaille (another bastard) ... etc. They'd shower us with decorations and flowers, we'd march through the Arc de Triomphe, We'd go to a restaurant, they'd serve us free of charge, we'd never pay for anything anymore, never as long as we lived! We're heroes! we'd say when they brought the bill ... Defenders of the Patrie! That would do it! ... We'd pay with little French flags! ... The lady at the cash desk would refuse to take money from heroes, she'd even give us some, with kisses thrown in, as we filed out. Life would be worth living."
    As I was running, I noticed my arm was bleeding, just a little though, a far from satisfactory wound, a scratch. I'd have to start all over.
    It was raining again, the fields of Flanders oozed with dirty water. For a long time I didn't meet a soul, only the wind and a little later the sun. From time to time, I couldn't tell from where, a bullet would come flying merrily through the air and sunshine, looking for me, intent on killing me, there in the wilderness. Why? Never again, not if I lived another hundred years, would I go walking in the country. A solemn oath.
    Walking along, I remembered the ceremony of the day before. It had taken place in a meadow, at the foot of a hill; the colonel had harangued the regiment in his booming voice:
    "Go to it, boys," he had cried. "Go to it, boys," and "Vive la France!" When you have no imagination, dying is small beer; when you do have an imagination, dying is too much. That's my opinion. My understanding has never taken in so many things at once. The colonel had never had any imagination. That was the source of all his trouble, and of ours even more so. Was I the only man in that regiment with any imagination about death? I preferred my own kind of death, the kind that comes late ... in twenty years ... thirty ... maybe more ... to this death they were trying to deal me right away ... eating Flanders mud, my whole mouth full of it, fuller than full, split to the ears by a shell fragment. A man's entitled to an opinion about his own death. But which way, if that was the case, should I go? Straight ahead? My back to the enemy. If the M.P.s were to catch me roaming around I knew my goose was cooked. They'd give me a slapdash trial that same afternoon in some deserted classroom ... There were lots of empty classrooms wherever we went. They'd play court-martial with me the way kids play when the teacher isn't there. The noncoms seated on the platform, me standing in handcuffs in front of the little desks. In the morning they'd shoot me: twelve bullets plus one. So what was the answer?
    And I thought of the colonel again, such a brave man with his breastplate and his helmet and his mustache, if they had exhibited him in a music hall, walking as I saw him under the bullets and shellfire, he'd have filled the Alhambra, he'd have outshone Fragson,[9] and he was a big star at the time I'm telling you about. That's what I was thinking. My heart was down in the dumps.
    After hours and hours of cautious, furtive walking, I finally caught sight of our men near a clump of farmhouses. That was one of our advance posts. It belonged to a squadron that was billeted nearby. Nobody killed, they told me. Every last one of them alive! I was the one with the big news: "The colonel's dead," I shouted, as soon as