Light by Henri Barbusse (good novels to read in english txt) 📕

the little glass cupboard of his shop as I came out. He is finding it harder and harder to keep going; he has aged a lot, and his frame, so powerfully bolted together, cracks with rheumatism.

We sit down. Crillon groans and bends so low in his hand-to-hand struggle with the pains which beset him that I think his forehead is going to strike the marble-topped table.

He tells me in detail of his little business, which is going badly, and how he has confused glimpses of the bare and empty future which awaits him--when a sergeant with a fair mustache and eyeglasses makes his entry. This personage, whose collar shows white thunderbolts,[1] instead of a number, comes and sits near us. He orders a port wine and Victorine serves it with a smile. She smiles at random, and indistinctly, at all the men, like Nature.

[Footnote 1: Distinctive badge for Staff officers and others.--Tr.]

The newcomer takes off his cap, looks at the windows and yawns. "I'm bored," he says.

He comes nearer and freely offers us his talk. He sets himself chattering with spirited and easy grace, of men and things. He works at the Town Hall and knows a lot of secrets which he lets us into. He points to a couple of sippers at a table in the corner reserved for commercial people. "The grocer and the ironmonger," he says, "there's two that know how to go about it! At the beginning of the war there was a business crisis by the force of things, and they had to tighten their belts like the rest. Then they got their revenge and swept the dibs in and hoarded stuff up, and speculated, and they're still revenging themselves. You should see the stocks of goods they sit on in their cellars and wait for the rises that the newspapers foretell! They've got one excuse, it's true--there are others, bigger people, that are worse. Ah, you can say that the business people will have given a rich notion of their patriotism during the war!"

The fair young man stretches himself backward to his full length, with his heels together on the ground, his arms rigid on the table, and opens his mouth with all his might and for a long time. Then he goes on in a loud voice, careless who hears him, "Why, I saw the other day, at the Town Hall, piles of the Declarations of Profits, required by the Treasury. I don't know, of course, for I've not read them, but I'm as sure and certain as you are that all those innumerable piles of declarations are just so many columns of cod and humbug and lies!"

Intelligent and inexhaustible, accurately posted through the clerk's job in which he is sheltering, the sergeant relates with careless gestures his stories of scandals and huge profiteering, "while our good fellows are fighting." He talks and talks, and concludes by saying that after all _he_ doesn't care a damn as long as they let him alone.

Monsieur Fontan is in the café. A woman leads up to him a tottering being whom she introduces to him. "He's ill, Monsieur Fontan, because he hasn't had enough to eat."

"Well now! And I'm ill, too," says Fontan jovially, "but it's because I eat too much."

The sergeant takes his leave, touching us with a slight salute. "He's right, that smart gentleman," says Crillon to me. "It's always been like that, and it will always be like that, you know!"

Aloof, I keep silence. I am still tired and stunned by all these sayings in the little time since I remained so long without hearing anything but myself. But I am sure they are all true, and that patriotism is only a word or a tool for many. And feeling the rags of the common soldier still on me, I knit my brows and realize that it is a disgrace and a shame for the poor to be deceived as they are.

Crillon is smiling, as always! On his huge face, where every passing day now leaves some marks, on his round-eyed weakened face with its mouth opened like a cypher, the old smile of yore is spread out. I used to think then that resignation was a virtue; I see now that it is a vice. The optimist is the permanent accomplice of all evil-doers. This passive smile which I admired but lately--I find it despicable on this poor face.

* * * * * *


The café has filled up with workmen, either old or very young, from the town and the country, but chiefly the country.

What are they doing, these lowly, these ill-paid? They are dirty and they are drinking. They are dark, although it is the forenoon, because they are dirty. In the light there is that obscurity which they carry on them; and a bad smell removes itself with them.

I see three convalescent soldiers from the hospital join the plebeian groups; they are recognized by their coarse clothes, their caps and big boots, and because their gestures are soldered together and conform to a common movement.

By force of "glasses all round," these drinkers begin to talk in loud voices; they get excited and shout at random; and in the end they drop visibly into unconsciousness, into oblivion, into defeat.

The wine-merchant is at his cash desk, which shines like silver. He stands behind the center of it, colorless, motionless, like a bust on a pedestal. His bare arms hang down, pallid as his face. He comes and wipes away some spilled wine, and his hands shine and drip, like a butcher's.

* * * * * *


"I'm forgetting to tell you," cried Crillon, "that they had news of your regiment a few days ago. Little Mélusson's had his head blown to bits in an attack. Here, y'know; he was a softy and an idler. Well, he was attacking like a devil. War remakes men like that!"

"Termite?" I asked.

"Ah, yes! Termite the poacher! Why it's a long time since they haven't seen him. Disappeared, it seems. S'pose he's killed."

Then he talks to me of this place. Brisbille, for instance, always the same, a Socialist and a scandal.

"There's him," says Crillon, "and that dangerous chap Eudo as well, with his notorient civilities. Would you believe it, they've not been able to pinch him for his spying proclensities! Nothing in his past life, nothing in his conductions, nothing in his expensiture, nothing to find fault with. Mustn't he be a deep one?"

I presume to think--suppose it was all untrue? Yet it seemed a formidable task to upset on the spot one of the oldest and most deeply rooted creeds in our town. But I risk it. "Perhaps he's innocent."

Crillon jumps, and shouts, "What! You suspect him of being innocent!" His face is convulsed and he explodes with an enormous laugh, a laugh irresistible as a tidal wave, the laugh of all!

"Talking about Termite," says Crillon a moment later, "it seems it wasn't him that did the poaching."

The military convalescents are leaving the tavern. Crillon watches them go away with their parallel movements and their sticks.

"Yes, there's wounded here and there's dead there!" he says; "all those who hadn't got a privilential situation! Ah, la, la! The poor devils, when you think of it, eh, what they must have suffered! And at this moment, all the time, there's some dying. And we stand it very well, an' hardly think of it. They didn't need to kill so many, that's certain--there's been faults and blunders, as everybody knows of. But fortunately," he adds, with animation, putting on my shoulder the hand that is big as a young animal, "the soldiers' deaths and the chief's blunders, that'll all disappear one fine day, melted away and forgotten in the glory of the victorious Commander!"

* * * * * *


There has been much talk in our quarter of a Memorial Festival.

I am not anxious to be present and I watch Marie set off. Then I feel myself impelled to go there, as if it were a duty.

I cross the bridge. I stop at the corner of the Old Road, on the edge of the fields. Two steps away there is the cemetery, which is hardly growing, since nearly all those who die now are not anywhere.

I lift my eyes and take in the whole spectacle together. The hill which rises in front of me is full of people. It trembles like a swarm of bees. Up above, on the avenue of trimmed limetrees, it is crowned by the sunshine and by the red platform, which scintillates with the richness of dresses and uniforms and musical instruments.

Then there is a red barrier. On this side of that barrier, lower down, the public swarms and rustles.

I recognize the great picture of the past. I remember this ceremony, spacious as a season, which has been regularly staged here so many times in the course of my childhood and youth, and with almost the same rites and forms. It was like this last year, and the other years, and a century ago and centuries since.

Near me an old peasant in sabots is planted. Rags, shapeless and colorless--the color of time--cover the eternal man of the fields. He is what he always was. He blinks, leaning on a stick; he holds his cap in his hand because what he sees is so like a church service. His legs are trembling; he wonders if he ought to be kneeling.

And I, I feel myself diminished, cut back, returned through the cycles of time to the little that I am.

* * * * * *


Up there, borne by the flag-draped rostrum, a man is speaking. He lifts a sculptural head aloft, whose hair is white as marble.

At my distance I can hardly hear him. But the wind carries me some phrases, louder shouted, of his peroration. He is preaching resignation to the people, and the continuance of things. He implores them to abandon finally the accursed war of classes, to devote themselves forever to the blessed war of races in all its shapes. After the war there must be no more social utopias, but discipline instead, whose grandeur and beauty the war has happily revealed, the union of rich