THE RAILWAY JUNCTION
To die is simple enough; only you should have the good taste to die in some selected spot—unless, of course, you are in China, where the dead are supreme and exercise almost more authority than the living. But in our country you have got to die properly, otherwise the living will look askance at you and say, “What does this corpse want? There’s no room for it here.”
In 1915 I was going through a kind of probation period at the railway junction of X., and I went on duty two or three times a week. Going on duty meant being on the spot and doing small insignificant jobs, being on guard or making a note of what was passing. Usually the man in charge used to be found in some gloomy place leading to the lamp-room. There he endured the long weary hours without interruption, and watched the military trains passing, full of men who had undergone six months’ campaigning. They sang while they journeyed from one hell to another, because inwar men do not let their thoughts travel far; as soon as they have got away from the guns they abandon themselves without restraint to the joy of being alive.
One Saturday night I was lying on a thick mattress which served as a bed. It was alive with mice. I felt these amiable little beasts at a finger’s length from my ears, and I listened with wandering attention to the noises coming from the junction. They were the sounds of a great railway station: whistles, shrieks, puffing engines, cries of the winches and the cranes, the vibrations of the taut iron rails, the sharp clatter of the signals, the repeated clash of the buffers of colliding trucks; and in the midst of it all, the clamour and the rhythm of military movements, the swing of a detachment on the march, the challenges of the sentries, commands, bell-ringings—all those things which indicate the forcible possession by armed might of the industrial organism.
My thoughts were running along these lines when I saw Corporal Bonardent enteringmy dug-out, blinding me with the flare of his acetylene lamp.
“Lieutenant!”
“I’m all attention, Bonardent.”
“Some poor devil in the food transport has just got himself done in, on the semi-permanent way 17. I’m told it’s a dreadful——”
“Let’s go there at once, Corporal!”
Two men were waiting for me outside with a stretcher. It was a glorious night, upon which the pale and flickering lights of the station hardly made an impression.
“It’s at La Folie,” said Bonardent: “it’s rather far from here.”
La Folie is a road-crossing, about a mile off. I asked a porter how to get there, and we started.
What is really amazing, in a large station, is that the organising imperative will which directs the rush of moving things lies hidden behind an apparent state of chaos and entanglement. We began to walk along lines of trucks that never ended. They seemed to have been left there and forgottensince the beginning of the war—rolling-stock that appeared to have had its day, with stiffened axles and couplings devoured by rust; but suddenly our lamp would light up an open door, and some soldiers were seen in a heap, sleeping on the straw, or there were cattle with stupefied looks. A few compartments had been turned into travelling offices, where clerks drudged through a mass of papers in a light reflected from a drawing-room lamp-shade; one felt that the terrible grasp of the administration had closed over the railways, just as its monstrous grip was in possession from the deep-dug trenches to the outfitting shops far away in the Pyrenees. Sometimes, crossing wide, dark spaces, we slipped between two trains that seemed petrified with eternal sleep; but all at once, though no one could be seen, the trains began to move towards each other, their ends clashing with a terrific clatter. Farther on we had to stop while hospital trains were passing. They afforded little comfort then, and there came to us, as the trains went by, a broadside of heart-rendingcoughs and puffs of the saturated chloride air with which the hospitals reeked. In addition, there were masses of fat mortars lashed on trucks, heaps of kitchens on wheels, and machinery whose uses one could not possibly guess, and all sorts of munitions of war, which night made fantastic. Heavy circular armour protected the cowering engines snorting in the pale light of the arc lamps. There were also, reminding one of former times, suburban trains that bore along drowsy passengers and express trains that swept over the intricate lines swift as a lash of the whip. In a word, a tumultuous roar, in which military movements clashed with the routine of civilian life.
At last we arrived at La Folie. It was an inextricable network of railways, discs, switches and metal cables. Three aged railway workers were living there in a shed. They were in shirt sleeves, and were turning the cranks, pulling the switches, directing with an orderly calm born of experience all the whirling forces which accumulated in that spot. They made me think of the foremenin past times who used to carry on when the managing directors were indulging in the pleasures of social life.
Above the rumbling noises a telegraph bell could be heard patiently ringing.
“We have come for the A.S.C. man,” said Bonardent.
“Oh! for that poor devil. He is there, under the sack and all around. My God!”
We entered the zone occupied by the corpse. I say “zone” deliberately, for the poor wretch had been cut up and scattered like a handful of grain at seed-time.
“God in Heaven!” said a railwayman with white hair; “why did the poor man come off the truck without looking round first? He made a terrible mistake. Here there is too much traffic for anyone to leave one’s post.”
The face of the dead man was intact, but sixty trucks had passed over his body, splitting it diagonally from the feet to the shoulders. We picked up, in one place and another, the remains—bleeding pieces of flesh, intestines, and, as I well remember, a handclutching a piece of cheese. Death had struck the man as he was eating.
The extraordinary thing was that his overcoat remained whole: it concealed from view the hideous annihilation of the body. Lifting it slightly, I saw his discipline book, on which one could decipher the name Lamailleux.
“I think,” I said, “we’ve got him all now.”
An electric lamp, perched high up, gave a fitful light and seemed to be suffering from irritating twitches.
I decided that we should take a short cut back across “The Artillery”—a huge siding where munition trains had been shunted. But, as we got near the railways, a sentry appeared:
“Halt! Who goes there?”
None of us had thought of the password. The territorial barred the way with his rifle. He was adamant:
“I am sorry, Lieutenant, but you must go another way: those are my orders.”
A long turning brought us before another sentry.
“The password, please! You can’t go through ‘The Artillery’ without it.”
“My friend, we are taking away a dead body.”
I raised the corner of the sacking and uncovered the bluish face. In the light of the acetylene a portion of the pale skin with some tattooed marks could be seen through the chaotic heap of clothes that were saturated with blood. A look of horror passed over the guard’s face, but he said again:
“Lieutenant, go along the main line! It’s not possible this way.”
We plunged back again along the network of rails, disturbed by the clatter of the signals and the rumbling convoys. Sometimes the exhausted stretcher-bearers stopped and placed their burden on the stony embankment and carefully spat on their hands. Trains went by, and we could see, in the bright compartments, women reading, tightly clasping beautiful children who had fallen asleep.
At last the station lights came into view.
“Where are we taking the corpse?” I asked Bonardent.
“I don’t know, sir.”
I finally decided to present myself at thePetite Vitesse. A room there had been taken to receive the wreckage cast off from the swirling activity of the railway station—lost trunks, unemployed men, riderless beasts, stores with no destination, and, when necessary, corpses. A gendarme was smoking a cigarette in front of the door.
“Lieutenant, there’s no room here to-day. It’s full of fugitives from the north, with their kids and packages.”
I uttered a few words of encouragement to my men, and made up my mind to try the “draft-pavilion.” It was occupied by detachments that were rejoining their corps. The men were sleeping in heaps on the straw.
“Oh! you must see it’s quite impossible to put it here with the men,” said an adjutant, shaking his head. He added, as if to excuse himself:
“Put yourself in my place, Lieutenant. Ihave no authority.... I can’t take charge of a corpse without orders....”
I sat down on a stone. The stretcher-bearers, worn out, mopped their brows and uttered the word “Drink!” I looked at the shapeless mass of Lamailleux, which seemed quite indifferent to this last cross it had to bear, and it waited for its eternal resting-place with the sovereign patience of death.
“I don’t suppose you are well acquainted with the station,” said the Adjutant to me; “but there’s a guard-room there for the transport men stationed here. I’ll go and see.”
I let him go and began to smoke, contemplating the night, which was warm and glorious. The tranquillity of the objects seemed, like the agitation of the men, to say distinctly: “Why is this man upsetting us all with this useless corpse?” And an insect, ecstatic in the rare grass, emitted a sharpening crescendo of sound like a little being who imagines that the whole earth exists and was made for him.
The Adjutant emerged from the darkness.
“It’s most unfortunate. A man is locked up there for drunkenness: he has been sick all over the place.”
“Well, all right! Let’s go and see the station-master.”
He was asleep. His deputy was reading the illustrated papers. While I stated my case he asked me to advise him what pictures he should cut out to stick on the walls from among the little women of theVie fantaisiste, of which he seemed to be an inveterate reader. As I remained surly, he said, as if in parenthesis:
“As for this dreadful business, it is an awful pity that the hospital is at the other end of the town. You can’t go there at this time of night. Put the thing in a truck until to-morrow morning, old chap!”
Having, by this wonderful suggestion, relieved himself of all responsibility, the young man stuck his nose again into the illustrated paper.
At that time they had not erected at the railway stations those large hospitals of wood and cardboard which are to be seen everywherenow. The idea of the truck I did not entertain for two seconds. In imagination I saw this improvised mortuary starting out during the night and taking away the corpse. It was a mad idea!
I went to the postmen: they were sorting out the letters. They were humming: “It is I who am Nénesse.” There wasn’t room for a rat in their hutch, and at once they regarded the question as quite beyond their jurisdiction....
I came out overcome with a kind of annoyance. Really, nobody took the slightest interest in my dead man. I muttered to myself: “Why, why, Lamailleux, did you let yourself die in a place where corpses are not wanted, and at a moment when no one has time to deal with them?” But even as I said that, I felt none the less a kind of link being established between me and this wreckage, and I looked at it as at something which puzzles you, but which belongs to you in spite of everything.
“Where shall we put the poor man?” said Bonardent.
Then the simplest solution struck me.
“Follow me,” I said.
Quietly we went back towards the lamp-room.
“There’s no room there, Lieutenant.”
“Proceed, Corporal.”
I got the stretcher carried into the room reserved for my use.
“Now, put it there, alongside my mattress, and go to bed.”
The men went out, shaking their heads with amazement. I remained alone with Lamailleux and lay down on the sheets. War had already taught me to live and to sleep in the company of the dead, and I was surprised that I had not, from the first, thought of so natural a solution.
For a long time, in the light of a candle, I looked at the frightful heap which was my night companion. There was no smell yet. I blew out the candle and could think at leisure.
From the stretcher there fell softly every second a drop of something which must have been blood. For a long time I counted thedrops, thinking of many things that were as mournful as the epoch I lived in. Loud whistles pierced the blackness, and I had already counted several hundreds of the drops when I fell into a sleep that was like that of my comrade—undisturbed by dreams.