The French Art of War E-Book

Alexis Jenni

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

It was the beginning of the Gulf War. I watched it on TV and did little else. I was doing badly, you see. Everything was going wrong. I just awaited the end. But then I met Victorien Salagnon, a veteran of the great colonial wars of Indochina, Vietnam and Algeria, a commander who had led his soldiers across the globe, a man with the blood of others up to his elbows. He said he would teach me to paint; he must have been the only painter in the French Forces, but out there no one cares about such things. I cared, though. In return, he wanted me to write his life story. And so he talked, and I wrote, and through him I witnessed the rivers of blood that cut channels through France, I saw the deaths that were as numberless as they were senseless and I began finally to understand the French art of war.

Leseprobe

The French Art of War

ALEXIS JENNI is a French novelist and biology teacher. His debut novel, The French Art of War, won the 2011 Prix Goncourt. He lives in Lyon.

Contents

COMMENTARIES I

The departure for the Gulf of the Spahis of Valence

NOVEL I

The life of rats

COMMENTARIES II

I have known better days and left them behind

NOVEL II

Going up to the maquis in April

COMMENTARIES III

A prescription for painkillers from the all-night pharmacy

NOVEL III

The Zouave regiments arrive in the nick of time

COMMENTARIES IV

Here and there

NOVEL IV

The first times, and what came after

COMMENTARIES V

The fragile nature of snow

NOVEL V

The war in this bloody garden

COMMENTARIES VI

I saw her around all the time, but I’d never have dared speak to her

NOVEL VI

Trifid, hexagonal, dodecahedral war; self-consuming monster

COMMENTARIES VII

We watched, uncomprehending, the paseo of the dead

Copyright

What is a hero? Neither the living man nor the dead,but one […] who infiltrates the other world and returns.

PASCAL QUIGNARD

It was so stupid. We frittered people away.

BRIGITTE FRIANG

The best order of things, as I see it, is the one that includes me;to hell with the best of all possible worlds if I am not part of it.

DENIS DIDEROT

Commentaries I

The departure for the Gulf of the Spahis of Valence

THE FIRST DAYS OF 1991 were marked by preparations for the Gulf War and the mounting escalation of my utter irresponsibility. Snow blanketed everything, blocking the trains, muffling every sound. In the Gulf, mercifully, temperatures had dropped; the soldiers no longer sweltered as they had in summer when, stripped to the waist, they would splash each other with water, never taking off their sunglasses. Oh, those handsome summer soldiers, of whom barely one had died! They emptied whole canteens over their heads and the water evaporated before reaching the ground, running in rivulets over their skin and immediately evaporating to create a misty mandorla shot through with rainbows about their lithe, toned bodies. Sixteen litres they had to drink every day, the summer soldiers; sixteen litres, because they sweated so much under the weight of their equipment in a part of the world where there are no shadows. Sixteen litres! The television peddled numbers and those numbers became fixed as numbers always do: precisely. Rumour peddled figures that everyone bandied about before the attack. Because it was about to be launched, this attack upon the fourth largest army in the world; the Invincible Western Army would soon begin their advance, while, on the other side, the Iraqis dug in behind twisted hanks of barbed wire, behind S-mines and rusty nails, behind trenches filled with oil, which they would set ablaze at the last moment, because they had lots of oil, so much oil they did not know what to do with it. Television reeled off details, invariably precise, delving at random through old footage. Television dug up images from before, neutral images that offered no information; we knew nothing about the Iraqi army, nothing about its forces, its positions, we knew only that it was the fourth largest army in the world; this we knew because it was endlessly repeated. Numbers imprint themselves on the memory, because they are unambiguous, we remember them and therefore believe them. On and on it went. There seemed to be no end to the preparations.

In the early days of 1991 I was barely working. I went into the office only when I ran out of ideas to justify my absence. I visited doctors who were prepared, without even listening to my symptoms, to sign me off sick for implausible periods of time, which I made every effort to further extend by slowly honing my skills as a forger. At night, in the lamplight, I would retrace the figures as I listened to music on my headphones; my whole universe reduced to the pool of light, reduced to the space between my ears, reduced to the tip of the blue ballpoint that gradually afforded me even more free time. I would practise on a scrap of paper and then, with a sure hand, transform the symbols made by the doctors. In doing so, I doubled, I tripled the number of days I could spend in the warm, far from my work. I never discovered whether changing these symbols, falsifying numbers with a ballpoint pen, was enough to change reality, I never wondered whether there was some record other than the doctor’s certificate, but it didn’t matter; the office where I worked was so badly organized that sometimes when I didn’t go in, no one noticed. When I showed up the following day, no one paid any more attention than they did when I wasn’t there, as though absence were nothing. I was absent and my absence went unnoticed. So I stayed in bed.

On Monday early in 1991 I heard on the radio that Lyon was cut off by snow. The snowfall had brought down telephone cables, most trains were marooned in the stations, and those caught unawares outside a station were covered with eiderdowns of snow. The people inside tried not to panic.

Here on the Scheldt river a few scant snowflakes fell, but further south everything had ground to a halt except for the huge snow-ploughs moving at a snail’s pace, each trailed by a line of cars, and the helicopters bringing aid to isolated villages. I was delighted that this had happened on a Monday, since no one knew here what the snow was like, so they would make a mountain out of it, a mysterious catastrophe, mindlessly trusting the pictures they saw on television. I phoned the office 300 metres away and claimed to be 800 kilometres away amid the white hills being shown on the news. Everyone at work knew I was from the Rhône, the Alps; I would sometimes go home for the weekend, they knew that; and since they had no real conception of mountains, of snow, everything tallied, there was no reason for me not to be snowed in like everyone else.

Then I went to my girlfriend’s house opposite the train station.

She was not surprised; she had been expecting me. She, too, had seen the snow outside her window and the flurries across the rest of France on the TV. She had called in sick, in that feeble tone she could adopt on the phone: she said she was suffering from the acute flu devastating France that had been all over the news; she could not come in to work today. She was still in her pyjamas when she let me in, so I got undressed and we lay on the bed, sheltering from the snowstorm and the sickness that were ravaging France and from which there was no reason, no reason at all, that we should be spared. We were victims, like everybody else. We made love undisturbed, while outside a light snow went on falling, floating, landing, flake after flake, in no hurry to arrive.

My girlfriend lived in a studio flat consisting of a single room with an alcove, and the bed in the alcove took up the whole space. I felt at peace next to her, wrapped in the duvet, our desires sated; we were happy in the quiet heat of a timeless day when no one knew where we were. I was happy in the warmth of my adoptive sanctuary with this woman who had eyes of every colour, eyes I wanted to draw in green and blue crayons on brown paper. I wanted to, but I had no talent for drawing; and yet only art could have done justice to her eyes and the miraculous light in them. Words are not enough; they needed to be depicted. The transcendent colour of her eyes defied description in words and left no clues. I needed to show them. But showing is something that can be improvised, as idiotic TV sets demonstrated every day of the winter of 1991. The TV was turned towards the bed, so we could see the screen by plumping up the pillows to raise our heads. Sperm tugged at the hairs on my thighs as it dried, but I had no desire to shower; it was cold in the tiny bathroom and I was happy lying next to her, and so we watched television as we waited for desire to return.

The big news on TV was Operation Desert Storm, a codename straight out of Star Wars, cooked up by the scriptwriters of a special Cabinet. Gambolling alongside came Daguet, the French operation with its limited resources. ‘Daguet’ is French for a young stag, a fawn, a barely pubescent Bambi just starting to sprout antlers that frisks and frolics, never far from his parents. Where do these army types come up with these names? Who uses a word like ‘Daguet’? It had probably been suggested by a senior officer, the sort of guy who goes deer-hunting in the grounds of the family estate. Desert Storm is a name anyone on Earth can understand, it bursts from the mouth, explodes in the heart, it’s a video-game title. Daguet is elegant, it elicits a knowing smile from those who get the reference. The army has its own language, which is not the common tongue, and that is rather worrying. Military types in France do not speak, or do so only among themselves. We laugh about it. We think them so profoundly stupid they have no need of words. What have they ever done to us that we should treat them with such contempt? What have we ever done that the military should want to keep themselves to themselves?

The French army is a thorny subject. We don’t know what to think of these guys, we certainly don’t know what to do with them. They clutter up the place with their berets, the regimental traditions about which we know little and care nothing, and their ruinously expensive equipment that makes such a dent in our taxes. The army in France is silent, ostensibly it answers to the Head of the Armed Forces, an elected civilian who knows nothing, takes care of everything and allows it do as it pleases. In France we have no idea what to think about ‘the troops’, we don’t even dare use the possessive, which might allow us to think of them as : we ignore them, fear them, mock them. We wonder why they do it, this tainted job steeped in blood and death; we assume conspiracies, unwholesome impulses, serious intellectual limitations. We prefer our soldiers out of sight, holed up in their secure bases in the south of France or travelling the world defending the last crumbs of Empire, gadding about overseas as they used to, in white uniforms with gold piping, on gleaming boats that shimmer in the sun. We prefer them to be far away, to be invisible, to leave us in peace. We prefer them to unleash their violence elsewhere, in far-off countries inhabited by people so unlike us that they hardly qualify as people.