THE HORSE-DEALERS
They have all been summoned to report at noon, though many of them will not be wanted until evening.
There they stand round the entrance—like a dark puddle, one would almost say; others are scattered about in the garden, gloomily walking up and down.
It is an afternoon of February. The heavy and anxious sky is surcharged in one limitless stretch. It appears to bear no relation to the little events that happen down here, so melancholy is its mood. The wind is surly. It must know what they are doing far away, but it says nothing; not even the deepest rumble of the cannon is borne along the breeze; we are far away, and must forget....
The wind swirls in between the buildings, sweeps back on itself, enraged like a wild beast caught in a trap.
The men pay no attention to the sky, or to the wind, or to the chilling light of winter; they are thinking of themselves.
They do not know each other; theyhave been brought here by a cause which is common to all of them. They are so bewildered and exhausted that they cannot even pretend to be indifferent.
On a closer view, there is about them something that sets them all into a class apart: a lack of physical vitality, a sickly look about the body, too much flesh or too little, eyes blazing with fever, sometimes an obvious infirmity, more often a wan skin faintly coloured with very poor blood. Never a joyous relaxation of healthy muscles: all of them have the slow, dragging movement of the snail.
Finding themselves herded together an unendurable thought, some have started a conversation to satisfy their pride; others are silent, too proud to talk.
There are wage-earners there, professional men, and long-haired intellectuals whose bitter looks are veiled by spectacles.
Everybody smokes. Never has it been so clear that tobacco is an anodyne for soul sickness.
From time to time, two or three menreach the garden gate and disappear for a few minutes. They return wiping their mouths, their breath reeking with wine.
Every few minutes the door opens. A gendarme appears and calls out some names. Those who are called push their way through the crowd, as if drawn by threads.
Their mouths twitch a little at the corners. They affect a detached, bored, or chaffing expression, and they vanish under the arch.
They no longer see the February sky; no longer do they breathe the cold odorous wind: they are pushed one against the other into a filthy corridor, from the walls of which—painted Heaven knows how!—oozes a thick, slimy sweat.
They remain there herded for some time, until another door opens. A gendarme counts them off by the dozen, like fruit or cattle, and hustles them into a large hall where the Thing is to take place....
At once a sickening smell of man makes them gasp. They cannot at first see very clearly what all the movement going onthere is about. But they are left no time to think.
What indeed is the good of thinking at a time when an immense lamenting cry escapes from the entire stricken nation—a desperate call, the death-rattle of a drowning people?
Why think? Does that frenzied, roaring whirlwind which lays waste the old continent, doesthatthink? No, it is not indeed the time for thought.
The men have to undress quickly and fall in—in rows.
The hall is huge and forbidding. Its walls are decorated with texts, and there are busts of unknown men; in the centre a table, as at a tribunal.
Some big-wig, white-haired and rather arrogant, is enthroned there; he seems exhausted, but pertinacious. He is assisted by some obscure supernumeraries.
In front of the table, two doctors in white overalls—one old and wizened, the other still young, with a preoccupied, listless look.
The men advance in single files towards each of the doctors in white: they march one behind the other like suppliants proceeding to the altar of an angered God. They do not know what to do with their arms.
They are not the flower of the race: for a long time now the finest men in the land have been living up to their waists in mud, alert as cats to the dangers threatening them. It is long since the farmer found anything in his winnow except chaff and dust, and it is there still that he searches with an avaricious hand for a few scattered grains.
The men are not cold: hot blasts of air come rushing along the floor from a blazing heating apparatus. Yet many of the men shiver. Balancing sometimes on one hip, sometimes on another, they fold and unfold their arms, then drop them, failing to strike any attitude. They are ashamed of their nakedness.
In the corner, near the door, a gendarme is pushing and hustling a thin, frail little worker who is too slow in undressing: hethought he need not pull off his socks and pants. He is forced to do so, however, and he discloses two unwashed feet.
The men in overalls work with feverish haste, like scene-shifters on the stage.
They ask short, succinct questions, and at once they feel and press with their quickly moving hands.
The victim is rather pale. A warm dew comes out in beads on his temples. He mumbles and speaks entreatingly. Then, examined once again, he replies with more assurance.
“You only suffer from that. Do you cough?”
“Yes.”
“You are sure you suffer from palpitation of the heart?”
“Oh, quite sure, quite!”
“Then you have pain in talking?”
“Yes; that above all.”
“Your digestion is not good?”
“No; it never has been.”
The man seemed quite reassured. He replied with a kind of enthusiasm—like someone who is at last understood. But, all at once, the old doctor shrugs his shoulders and reveals the trap:
“You’ve got everything wrong with you—that’s quite clear. Well, you are classed A1—the fighting line.”
“But surely you are aware——”
“You have too many illnesses; there’s nothing wrong with you. Get out! The fighting line for you!”
Sometimes somebody coughs, and at once a storm of coughing breaks out among the men gathered there.
A big grey-haired fellow comes out of a dark corner. Everybody shrinks away from him, with a kind of disgust. Then he remonstrates with his neighbours:
“Hang it! D’you think that spots on the skin....”
Behind him, collapsed almost on a bench, a tall man who might be anything between twenty and sixty years of age is carefully undressing. His face makes you feel very sorry for him: he seems plunged in the depths of human despair. He takes off anincredible amount of clothing, knitted vests and woollen things; and then there appear some very touching articles: satchels, flannel fronts, scapularies, objects of devotion. All these he places on the bench. The men next to him shift suddenly, and his clothes slip on the floor and are trodden upon by those who have just come in. The man is very pale, as if people were trampling upon his intimate life and his self-respect.
A discussion suddenly breaks upon the silence. The old doctor was exclaiming in a furious tone:
“I tell you I can hear nothing!”
With both hands he was pressing down the shoulders of a poor weak wretch as thin as a poker, and who looked terrified.
With one word the poor devil was ordered into the fighting forces, and he went away, more upset, trembling and panic-stricken than he would ever be in the trenches in front of the machine-guns.
But at the other end of the hall something unusual was happening.
“I tell you I can walk,” protested arasping voice, eaten away by goodness knows what disease.
“No,” replied the young doctor, “no; be reasonable, and go home. We’ll take you later when you’ve recovered.”
“If you don’t want me, I shall do myself in.... But I tell you I have reasons for going to the front. I am not going to stand any more insults day after day.”
A short silence takes possession of everyone in the room: the echo of a tragedy is felt. The man is obviously very ill. His chest is horrible, distorted by violent breathing. He can hardly stand on his swollen legs, which are marked with large purple veins.
“Rejected!” cries the judge.
And the unfortunate creature returns to his rags, with lowered shoulders, his eyes dazed like a bull that has been felled.
The man who followed was a fatalist: he refused to discuss his position.
“That won’t prevent you serving.”
“Bah! just as you like.”
“Then, the fighting line!”
“As you wish; I don’t care a damn.”
And he withdraws immediately, liberated like a man who stakes his future on a mere throw of the dice.
All those who go away leave behind them something of the heavy smell of unwashed bodies. Curious thing, they all have a fetid breath; for that day they have eaten too quickly, badly digested their food, smoked and drunk too much. From all these mouths comes the same warm, sour breath which betrays the same emotion—the same breakdown of the machine.
The atmosphere of the room gradually thickens. The lamps, which had been lit quite early, appear to be lined with a heavy clinging moisture that affects all the objects in the room. But above all hovers something more elusive and discordant—the air seems to be charged with nervous energy, the fragments of broken wills, the wreckage of the thoughts abandoned there by men who had to strip themselves naked, who were afraid, who yearned and did not yearn, who measured with anguish their powers ofresistance and the sacrifice they had to make, who fought with all their might against the forces of destiny.
The men in overalls continue to move about among these human bodies. They do not stop feeling, manipulating, judging. They sink the ends of their fingers into the flesh of the shoulders and sides; they press the biceps with their thumb and middle finger, move joints, examine teeth and the inside of eyelids, pull hair, and tap chests as customs officers do casks. Then they make the men walk from left to right, and right to left. They make them bend, straighten themselves, kneel down, or expose the most secret parts of their person.
Sometimes a breath of fresh air seems to come into the room: two well-built young men are asking to be enlisted. One hardly understands why they are there.... The whole tribunal looks at them with astonishment, as at pieces of golden ore in a handful of mud.
They pass with a proud, rather forced smile. Again the procession begins of patheticugliness, terrors, despairs, incurable and ravaged fears. The tribunal made one think of a jagged cliff against which persons are dashed like sea-birds blown by a storm.
The doctors show signs of exhaustion. The oldest, who is rather deaf, throws himself doggedly into his work, like a boar into the thicket. The young doctor is obviously suffering and irritated. He has the shrinking and uneasy look of some one engaged in an odious task and who finds no relief.
And always human flesh abounds; always from the same corner of the room comes the long row of wan bodies, who walk gingerly on the floor.
Sacred human flesh, sacred substance which serves thought, art, love, everything great in life—it is now nothing but a vile, evil-smelling lump of suet which one handles with disgust to find whether it is yet ready for the slaughter.
Everybody begins to suffer from an insistent headache.
The work goes on as in a dream, with the silences, the dragging movements, and thedark gaps of bad dreams. Two hours more pass in this way. Then suddenly some one says:
“Here are the last ten.”
They come in and undress one after the other. They have waited so long they seem exhausted, emptied, crushed. They accept the verdict listlessly and mechanically, as if felled by a blow; they go away in haste, without speaking, without looking round.
The doctors wash their hands, as once did Pontius Pilate; they sign some papers ceremoniously and disappear.
Night has come. The wind has fallen. A fog that absorbs the factory smoke still hangs over the town. Leaning against a lamp-post one of the last men examined vomits, after excruciating efforts, the wine he drank in the afternoon. The road is dark and deserted.
The whole place reeks with the stench of the vomiting and the fog.