Fear by Gabriel Chevallier Read Free Book Online Page B

thinkers . Today all we’ve got are specialists , blinded by dogma, who can’t think beyond the narrow boundaries of their military training.’
    ‘But they know how to do their job.’
    ‘No, they don’t even know that. Who was there to teach them? This war followed forty years of peace. The only training they could have got was through war games, manoeuvres, empty shams whose results couldn’t be measured. Our generals are like students fresh from college: all theory and no practice. They came to war with modern equipment and a military system that’s a century out of date. But now they’re learning, they are experimenting with us . The people of Europe are in the hands of arrogant, all-powerful, ignoramuses.’
    ‘So what do you think it takes to make a great military leader?’
    ‘Maybe the first requirement would be that they came from outside the army, so they could bring a fresh approach to understanding war. It isn’t so much a military leader we need as a real leader, which would be something much greater.’
    ‘Perhaps they’ll still find one . . .’
    ‘Perhaps . . .’
    The heat, the dirt, and the boredom had worn us out.
    My most vivid memory from this time was of a dead body, not one I saw but one I smelt. It was a night when we were trying to deepen a communication trench, hardly able to see where we were digging. As one of us struck his pick into the earth there was a squelch, the sound of something bursting. The pick had hit a damp, rotten stomach, which released its miasma right into our faces, in a sudden blast of foul vapour. The stench filled the air, covered our mouths like a foetid flannel so we could not breathe, pricked our eyelids with poisonous needles which brought tears to our eyes. This pestilential geyser caused a panic and the diggers fled the accursed spot. The decomposing body’s disgusting gasses spread out, filled the darkness and our lungs, reigned over the silence. The NCOs had to force us back to this angry corpse, and then we shovelled furiously, desperate to cover it up and calm it down. But our bodies had caught the awful, fecund smell of putrefaction, which is life and death, and for a long time that smell irritated our mucous membranes, stimulated the secretions of our glands, aroused in us some secret organic attraction of matter for matter, even when it is corrupt and almost extinguished. Our own promised, perhaps imminent, putrefaction found communion with this other, powerful extreme of putrefaction, which holds dominion over our pale souls and hunts them down remorselessly.
    That night I reflected on the destiny of the unknown soldier whose grave we had disturbed, and upon which many others would trample. I imagined a man like me, someone young, full of plans and ambitions, of loves still uncertain, scarcely out of childhood and about to launch himself into life. To me life is like a game you begin at twenty where victory is called success: money for most people, reputation for some, esteem for a very few. To live, to endure, that is nothing; to achieve is everything. I compare someone who dies young to a player who has just been dealt his cards and then forbidden to play. Maybe this particular player was taking his revenge . . . Twenty years of learning, of subordination, of hopes and desires, the sum of feelings that a human being carries within himself and which gives him his value, had all found their conclusion in a corner of a communication trench. If I must die now, I will not say it is awful or terrible, but it is unjust and absurd, because I have not yet attempted anything, I have done nothing but wait for my chance and my moment, built up my resources and waited. The life of my will and my tastes is only just starting – or will start, because the war has deferred it. If I disappear now, I will have been nothing but subordinate and anonymous. I will have been defeated.
    I got my first proper view of a wide section of the front on 15 August 1915. A