Is that true?’

‘Umm … morale … of course …’

But Adolphe Brun had pulled his nephew towards him and was hugging him; then he let him go and looked at him, his wide, bright eyes full of tears. He wanted to say something, make a joke … tell some funny story that Martial could tell the other soldiers that would make them say:

‘Those old blokes from Paris, I mean … they’re really something. They still know how to laugh.’

But he couldn’t think of anything. He just slapped the doctor on the shoulder, on his thin, yielding shoulder beneath the thick material of his uniform:

‘Off you go, my boy …,’ he muttered, ‘you’re a good, brave lad.’

* The final lines of ‘Sophocles’ Song at Salamis’ by Victor Hugo, from La Légende des Siècles, 1877.

5

The first-aid post was set up in the cellar; the house, solidly built and very old, had good foundations. It was a comfortable house in French Flanders, three kilometres from the German trenches. It had once looked squat, resilient, reassuring, its solid pillars framing the low door with its large rusty nails. A part of the house remained standing, the part where the silhouette of a tall, slim, mysterious woman wearing a turban had been sculpted above the casement window. The village had passed from one side to the other during the fighting that autumn in 1914. For the moment, the French occupied it. In this never-ending war that had started a few months before, people battled fiercely over a fountain, a forest, a cemetery, a bit of crumbling wall. The sudden advances of the enemy were no longer to be feared, but the bombardments grew more terrifying with every passing day; rubble piled up over the ruins. On sunny days, what had once been a pretty little French village (every gate was decorated with roses in bloom) now resembled a demolition site. Sunny days were rare. In the rain, obscured by the fog, it looked like a cemetery for houses, a heartbreaking sight. But the first-aid post stood firm.

‘Even if the house crumbles, the cellar won’t be affected,’ Martial had said. ‘So of course it will hold up.’

He was very proud of his cellar; it gave him pleasure to look at the thick walls, the vaulted stone ceiling above his head and the small alcoves that were dug out of the rock; one of them was his operating room; the other was where he slept; the third was a luxurious bedroom reserved for high-ranking officers who had been wounded. In his cellar, Martial could give free rein to his desire to be a home-owner, a feeling that circumstances had never before allowed him: orphaned when he was eight years old, he had moved from a school dormitory to a barrack room by way of furnished student accommodation. Everywhere, even in his dingy lodgings on the Rue Saint-Jacques as a first-year medical student, he had tried to ‘make it into a home for himself’, as he used to say with emotion. He had patched up the curtains that hung in ribbons, washed the skirting boards, polished the rickety night tables and arranged his books and family photos on the bookcase. He had spent so many hours imagining his future apartment on the Rue Monge: the living room with a yellow sofa, a leafy plant on the piano … his bedroom (the large bed and wardrobe with a mirror on the door), his consulting room. All of that had been taken away from him and replaced by a cellar in a strange house up north. Unfortunately, water was coming through the floor in certain places: the canal was nearby and, damaged in several places by the bombs, threatened to cave in at any moment and flood everything. The climate wasn’t exactly ideal; the entire region was soaked with rain and covered in mud. Everyone slept in a thick, whitish sludge that continuously shifted and sloshed about; they ate the rainwater that fell into their soup – more rainwater than soup – they fought, fell, died in mud.

A well-situated, enormous staircase led up from the cellar; the men lay on its rough, uneven, wide steps. Their wounds had just been dressed; they were waiting to be evacuated to ambulances. Some of them slept on their haversacks, others on the bare stone; a smell of idoform, blood and damp seeped from the walls. Sickly, sweet clouds of chloroform hung in the air. From the tiny room where he worked, the doctor could see the wounded men newly arrived from the most recent battles. First their shapeless shoes weighed down with clods of yellowish mud that they banged, in vain, against the floor to loosen the clinging earth, the entrails of the gutted land they carried with them; then their drenched, torn, stained greatcoats, stiff with encrusted mud, then the hollow faces almost hidden by their full beards. Some of them had boots, helmets and faces so covered in mud that they looked like shapeless masses of silt on the move; others had every single strand of hair in their moustache caked in mud.