1914

The boredom of those weeks, the solitude, and then—Anthime had the sudden impression one day, in front of the cathedral, that things might be looking up: as his gaze drifted over the pedestrians and pavement, he distractedly ran that gaze up the length of a cane tapping along the sidewalk across the street and wound up staring at a pair of glasses. Such canes were not yet white, as they would be painted only after the war, nor were the glasses completely black, and they weren’t dark enough to prevent Anthime from recognizing behind them the face of Padioleau. Sent home from the front at almost the same time as Anthime, guided by his mother holding on to his arm, blinded by a gas that had smelled like geraniums, Padioleau immediately recognized his voice.

The joy of their reunion did not last long, though. Anthime swiftly realized that without his sight, Padioleau as well no longer had the heart for much of anything. Deprived of his livelihood, never having imagined an alternative to the art, science, and style of carving up meat, Padioleau was reduced to zero, in despair over the absence of any possible vocational rehabilitation, unable to envisage a future or comfort himself with the idea that some people can overcome their handicaps and do so in many fields, even in the most sophisticated professions, where they may even reach the heights of genius—although it is true that among the blind, one runs into more pianists than butchers.

Once these two men had found each other again, they were obliged to try passing the time together. Cards being out of the question for Padioleau, reading aloud from the newspaper having finally lost its charm for Anthime, they once more found themselves seriously at loose ends. Attempting to dispel this ennui, they would often evoke the boredom they’d felt at the front and which, edged with terror, had been frankly worse, after all. They distracted themselves by recalling how they’d come up with distractions, and talked about the pastimes they’d invented in the past. D’you remember? D’you remember?

Arcenel used to busy himself sculpting bas-reliefs from the veins of white stone that surfaced in places from the clay of the trenches. Bossis had taken an interest in creating rings, watch charms, eggcups out of scavenged metals: aluminum from spent enemy shells, copper and brass from the shell casings, cast iron from the lemon and egg grenades. Drawing on his civilian background in shoes, Anthime had begun by cutting laces from abandoned leather straps. Then he’d had an idea and turned those same straps, knotted and furnished with a clasp, into wristbands to which he could attach pocket watches via small loops soldered on at six and twelve o’clock. Believing he’d invented the wrist-watch, Anthime had cherished the magnificent dream of copyrighting this invention when he got home—only to learn that ten years earlier, Louis Cartier had come up with the same idea to help out his friend Santos-Dumont, a pilot who’d complained how hard it was to consult his pocket watch while flying.

Yes, they’d had some good times in spite of everything. Even though delousing wasn’t heaps of fun, still, between alerts it was always a distraction for the men— albeit a vain and temporary one—to hunt down lice, to pry them loose from their skin and clothing, but that arthropod always leaves behind innumerable and constantly renewed eggs, which in clothes could only be killed by a firm pressing with a nice hot iron, an accessory not provided in the trenches. In addition to learning how to use conventional weapons, they’d acquired practical experience with slingshots, and one of their funniest memories, for example, was of winging tin cans full of urine over the barbed wire to the guys across the way. The concerts given by the regimental musicians had been entertaining in a different sense, and then there’d been the accordion the captain sent someone to buy in Amiens: he’d made sure it was played every evening, and the orderlies and liaison officers had danced to the music. And the days when mail was distributed, whenever possible—they had been fun, because the men had sent off a lot of mail and received a lot, too, tremendous numbers of postcards but also letters, among which had been the short note informing Anthime of Charles’s death. And now it was too late for Charles to take advantage of an advertisement that appeared two years into the conflict: “Le Miroir will pay any price for photographic documents of particular interest relating to the war.”

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