CUIRASSIER CUVELIER
The Cuvelier affair made a deep and lasting impression on me. M. Poisson is not a bad man—far from it! But he is too old, you know.
All these old men ought not to have been allowed to take part in the war. You know what it cost us. And the curious thing was, sir, that everybody admitted it; for in the end all these old fellows were sent out of harm’s way to Limousin, one after the other. But let’s talk of something else: this is almost politics, and is no business of mine.
Talking about M. Poisson, he has one great fault: he drinks. Apart from that, as I have told you, he wasn’t a bad sort. But the stuff a man is made of soon degenerates by being soaked continually with small doses, and often large ones too. M. Poisson drinks, and that’s unfortunate in a man who fills a responsible post.
What makes him even more peculiar is that he is not made as we others. He is in himself a unique type. The world, asM. Poisson sees it, falls into two classes. On one side, all those who are above him. When he is facing that way he salutes and says, “I understand,mon général; of course, colonel.” On the other side, all those who are below him. And when facing them, he gets purple with shouting, “Silence, will you!” and things of that kind. At bottom, I think he is right, and that he is bound to behave like that in his work. I repeat he isn’t a bad man—only timid. He shouts in order to convince himself he is not afraid.
But after all, that is a question of army administration, and it’s no business of mine. Let us talk of something else. It is a principle of mine never to speak of these things: it’s forbidden ground.
But I have a personal grudge against M. Poisson for having put me in the mortuary—I who can write in round hand or slanting hand, in Gothic or flowing hand, and a dozen others, and would have made such a capable secretary.
Just imagine how I was received: Iarrive with my helmet, knapsack, and all my rig-out. I am shown into a hut, and am told: “The doctor is in there.”
At first I see no one. M. Poisson is buried up to his hair in papers: I can just hear his asthmatical breathing, like wind blowing through keyholes. Suddenly he comes out of his hiding-place, and considers me. I see a rather heavy old man, short-legged, not very clean, with black-lined nails, an excess of skin on the back of the hand, a freckled skin that overlaps. He examines me carefully, but behaves as if he does not see me. I, on my part, look straight at him and observe him in detail: on his nose he has little varicose veins, his cheeks are rather blue, and under his chin hangs some loose skin, like the snout of beasts, and beneath his eyes two pouches that are never still, and brandy-coloured, which you feel like pricking with a pin.
He looks at me once again, spits, and says:
“Yes....”
I reply immediately:
“At your service, sir!”
Then he begins to shout in a hoarse voice:
“Speak when you are spoken to. Be quiet, will you! You see I’m up to my neck with this offensive, the wounded, and all these things here.”
What could I reply? I stand at attention and again say:
“Yes, sir; at your service, sir!”
He lights a cigarette and begins to wheeze, as you may have noticed, from the effects of alcohol on his chest.
At this juncture an officer comes in. M. Poisson exclaims:
“It’s you, Perrin? Oh, my dear fellow, let me alone, will you, to get on with this job! You see I am tired out with the work. Just look at my list: nineteen! I’ll never get to the end! Nineteen!”
The officer takes me by the arm and says:
“Oh! but this is the extra man that has been sent to us.”
Then M. Poisson comes nearer, looks at me closely, and bellows, his breath reeking with alcohol:
“Send him to the mortuary! Some one is wanted there. He can help Tanquerelle. To the mortuary! And no more nonsense!”
Ten minutes later I am stationed at the mortuary.
I became, sir, very wretched. I am fairly cheerful as a rule, but moving corpses about all day long cannot be called life. And such dead! The flower of the country, degraded to a depth which imagination cannot fathom.
Tanquerelle is an old butcher’s assistant. He too drinks. He is always given the most unpleasant work because he drinks, and his unpleasant work is an excuse for giving him more drinks. But I am not going to expatiate on that. The drink question is not my business, unfortunately.
Tanquerelle is no company: he is a calamity, a scourge, a breed apart, so to speak. When he is hungry, he never speaks; but he never is hungry. Usually he indulgesin small talk—the comments of a drunkard, painful to hear in the presence of these corpses.
We are told, sir, that dead bodies mean very little to one after a time, and that when you habitually live with them they become nothing more than stones to you. Well, that’s not my experience. Every one of these corpses, with which I pass my days, ends in being a companion to me.
I get to like some of them, and I am almost sorry to see them taken away. Sometimes, when I carelessly hit up against them with my elbow, it is with an effort that I do not say, “I beg your pardon, my friend.” I look at them, with their blistered hands, and their feet covered with corns after long trudging over the roads, and my heart understands and is touched.
I note a flighty ring on a finger, a birthmark on the skin, an old scar, sometimes even tattoes, and finally one of the things which man does not leave behind him: his poor grey hair, the lines of his face, the relic of a smile around his eyes, more oftentraces of terror. And all that sets my mind thinking. From their bodies I can read their history: I imagined how much they had worked with those arms, the many things they had seen with their eyes, how they had kissed with those lips, how proud they must have been of their moustache and their beard, on which now the lice were crawling, away from the cold, dead flesh. I think of these things as I sew up the corpses in the sacking; and the emotion I feel rather startles me, because mingled with my misery is a feeling of pleasure.
But I am wandering off into philosophy. Not being a philosopher, I haven’t the right to bore you.
I think I was speaking to you about Cuirassier Cuvelier. Well, let me return to the story.
It takes us back to the May offensives. I assure you, I wasn’t idle in those days. What numbers of dead passed through my hands! The poor unfortunate widows and mothers need have no anxiety: in my way, I did my duty. All of them were taken awaywith their mouths tightly closed with a chin-cloth, arms crossed on their bodies—that is, of course, if they still possessed mouths and arms—and I carefully wrapped them in the sacking. I do not mention their eyes: it was beyond my power to close them. It is too late, you know, by the time they arrive at the mortuary. Oh, I took good care of my dead!
One day they brought me one with no identification mark at all. His face was crushed in; bandages everywhere on his limbs, but no ticket, no disc on his wrist, nothing at all.
I placed him on one side, and the doctor was informed.
In a moment the door opened and M. Poisson came in.
His deportment was always good after he had some drink; you could tell it too from his manner of coughing and spitting and fingering his cross, for, you know, he was an Officer of the Legion of Honour.
“You have one too many here,” he said.
“Sir, I don’t know whether there is one too many, but there is a body here without an identification card.”
“It isn’t only that,” replied M. Poisson, “I see you have eight bodies here. Just wait a moment....”
He took out of his pocket a rumpled piece of paper, looking at it from every possible angle, then he shouted:
“Seven! Seven only! You ought only to have seven! You fool! Who brought this corpse here? I don’t want it. It’s not on the list. Where in the world did it come from?”
I began to tremble, and replied stammering:
“I didn’t notice which section brought it here.”
“Ah! You didn’t notice! And what do you think I’m going to do with it? Now, what is the man’s name?”
“But, sir, that’s just what I want to know. He hasn’t been identified.”
“Not identified! Now we’re in for it. You’ll hear again of this from me. It simplywon’t do. To begin with, come along with me at once!”
We go from hut to hut, M. Poisson asking at each door:
“Did any of you send us a body without identification papers?”
You can well imagine that when asked in this way all M. Poisson’s men took cover immediately. Some laughed secretly: others were alarmed. All made the same reply:
“A dead body without identification papers! Certainly not, Doctor; we never brought it.”
M. Poisson began to breathe heavily.
He spat everywhere; he was so angry that his voice was no longer human—it was hoarse, ragged and torn. In spite of his insufferable temper, I actually felt pity for the old man.
Back he goes to the office, I following close at his heels. Dashing to his papers and documents, he shuffles them about like a spaniel in the mud. Then, shouting angrily, he says:
“Here you are!—1236 came in; 561 havegone out. Do you understand? Six remain at present. That’s it: one is missing, and it must be the one. And nobody knows who he is! We are in a mess! We are in a mess!”
I confess that M. Poisson’s assurance made a great impression on me. Especially was I surprised at the accuracy of his figures. It is wonderful, sir, to note the efficiency of military organisation. We learn, for instance, that twenty-three stretchers out of a hundred have been lost—not one more, not one less; or 1000 wounded were brought in; 50 died; therefore 950 are still alive. To maintain this mathematical order, it is therefore clearly well worth while taking the trouble to make a list of everything that comes in and goes out. Listening to M. Poisson making his calculation, I saw, too clearly, how my poor unfortunate corpse was one too many.
The doctor repeated, “We are in a mess,” and added, “Now, you there! Come along with me.”
M. Poisson bustled off again in alldirections, to the left and to the right. I followed him, my head lowered, having been gradually seized by the fever that tortured him. He stopped all the officers.
“I’m fed up with this job! Go and see if the body wasn’t sent out from your huts.”
He entered the operating theatres and asked the surgeons:
“You didn’t send me an unidentified dead body?”
And every time he took out his rumpled piece of paper and added a cross, a number, with his pencil.
Towards evening he fixed me with another look. There were red patches underneath his eyes as highly coloured as raw ham.
“You!—go back to the mortuary! You’ll hear more of me yet!”
I went back, and sat down, feeling very wretched. Three fresh corpses had been brought in. Tanquerelle was hoisting them into coffins with the help of the carpenter.
On the table, temporarily shrouded in tent material, the unknown dead man was waiting his fate. Tanquerelle was completelydrunk and was singing “The Missouri,”—not exactly the thing to do in the midst of corpses. I went and drew aside the shroud and looked at the ice-cold body. His smashed face was covered with linen bandages. A few locks of fair hair could be seen. As for the rest, just an ordinary body, like yours or mine, sir.
Night had fallen. The door opened and M. Poisson, accompanied by another officer, appeared with a lantern. He seemed calm and replete, like a man who has dined well.
“You are an idiot,” he said to me. “Why couldn’t you see that this was the body of Cuirassier Cuvelier?”
“But, sir——”
“Oh, shut up! It’s Cuirassier Cuvelier.”
Coming up to the table, he noted the size of the corpse and exclaimed:
“Of course! He’s tall enough to be a cuirassier. You see, Perrin, Cuvelier was brought in the day before yesterday. According to the register, he was not taken out. As he is no longer under treatment,he is dead, and this must be he. That’s clear.”
“Obviously,” said Perrin, “it’s he right enough.”
“Yes; don’t you agree?” replied M. Poisson. “It’s Cuvelier; that is quite plain. Poor devil! Now we can go to bed....”
Then he turned towards me:
“You!—you will put him in the coffin, and stick on the lid: ‘Cuvelier, Edouard, 9th Cuirassiers.’ And then, you mind! no more pranks of this kind.”
When the officers had gone, I put Cuirassier Cuvelier in a coffin, and then I lay down for a few hours on my mattress.
The next morning I was preparing to nail down the coffin of Edouard Cuvelier, when I saw M. Poisson coming up once again. His face was not so calm as on the previous evening.
“Wait; don’t bury that man yet,” he said.
He walked round the coffin, and nibbled the end of a cigarette; he appeared indeed so uneasy that I knew at once he had not yet decided to thrust Cuvelier out into the abyss. It was not going to be done: the dead body was getting in the way and refused to be swallowed up. I don’t know whether M. Poisson had a high idea of his duty, or merely was afraid of complications; whatever it was, I sympathised greatly with him at that moment.
He turned towards me and, as he did not like to be alone, “Come along with me,” he said.
Off we went again, making the round of the huts.
“Hut No. 8?” began M. Poisson. “The seriously wounded are here, aren’t they? Is Cuirassier Cuvelier here?”
The men there made inquiries, and replied “No.”
We went on to the next.
M. Poisson began again:
“Hut No. 7? Have you here a man named Cuvelier, of the 9th Cuirassiers?”
“No,Monsieur le médecin-chef.”
M. Poisson was delighted with his success.
“Of course! They can’t have him, because he’s dead. I am doing this to satisfy my conscience. I’m made like that.”
We met M. Perrin.
“You see, Perrin,” said the doctor, “in order to be quite sure, I am looking in every hut to see if a Cuvelier may not be anywhere. And I can’t find a man of that name. Of course, I only look where the seriously wounded are quartered. I am not a fool. If he is dead, he must have been seriously wounded.”
“Obviously,” said M. Perrin.
After we had been to all the huts, M. Poisson held himself very proudly, causing many folds in the loose flesh under his chin, and he concluded by saying:
“It’s Cuvelier, sure enough. Now you see what it is to have order. With me it’s not the same as with Ponce and Vieillon, who are awful bunglers.”
“Perhaps,” M. Perrin said, “you would be wise to inquire among the lightly wounded.”
“Oh! well, if you think so,” said M. Poisson, rather indifferently.
And we proceeded to the huts of the “quick removals.” We went in, and asked the usual question. No one replied. On going out, M. Poisson repeated:
“Cuvelier isn’t here?”
Then suddenly we heard some one shouting:
“Yes; Cuvelier, present!”
And a tall, curly-headed man jumps off a bed, raising a hand that was very lightly bandaged....
Things take a tragic turn. M. Poisson turns dark purple, like a man stricken with apoplexy. He spits two or three times. He smacks his thighs, and says in a choking voice:
“God! he must be alive then!”
“I am Cuvelier,” the soldier remarks.
“Cuvelier, Edouard?”
“Yes; Edouard!”
“Of the 9th Cuirassiers?”
“That’s right: of the ‘9th Cuir’!”
M. Poisson goes out like a madman,followed by M. Perrin and myself. He goes to the mortuary, and he stands before the coffin, dribbles on his tunic, and says quite shortly:
“If it’s not Cuvelier, we have to begin all over again.”
Ah, sir! what a day it was!
The offensive was going on during that time. The dead were filling the place which had been reserved for them. But the very life of the service seemed to have been held up.
You have seen ships come to a stop in the middle of a river and holding up all the traffic? Well, this unknown corpse gave that impression. It was stranded right across our work and began to upset everything, beginning with the health of the unfortunate M. Poisson, who suggested taking sick leave.
Every hour he came and glanced at the body, which was beginning slowly to decompose. He stared at it stolidly.
During the afternoon I had a moment’s rest while M. Poisson took his siesta. About six he came again, and I hardly recognised him. His hands were almost clean, he wore a white collar, his beard was trimmed, and his breath like that of a man who has just rinsed his mouth invieux marc.
“What!” he said, “you haven’t yet closed down the German’s coffin! You are an incapable ass!”
“But, sir——”
“Hold your tongue! And write this inscription, and be quick!—‘An unknown German.’ D’you understand?”
M. Perrin had just come in. The two officers had one more look at the corpse.
“It’s obviously a Boche,” said M. Poisson.
“Yes; look at his fair hair.”
“Perrin, you ought to have thought of it sooner,” added the doctor.
The officers were about to go out, when M. Poisson turned round and said:
“Take the thing out of the coffin; since he’s a German, put him in the earth as he is, with all the other Huns.”