Read Online The Fires of Autumn by Irène Némirovsky - Free Book Online Page B

had been serious, stern, with bursts of juvenile cheerfulness, but completely determined to become hardened and to win, thanks to a heroic act of will. Perhaps he had overestimated his strength? Physically, he was strong, resistant to pain and exhaustion; he had become a man with broad shoulders who stood tall and was energetic and alert. Mentally, though, he had been wounded in a way that nothing in future could ever heal, a wound that would grow deeper every day of his life: it was a kind of weariness, a chink in his armour, a lack of faith, pure exhaustion and a fierce hunger for life. ‘And I’ll live for me, and me alone,’ he thought. ‘I’ve given them four years,’ and what he meant by these words was a sense of an entire hostile world set against him – leaders, enemies, friends, civilians,strangers, even his own family. Especially civilians! Those … It was the time when the home front thought they had sacrificed enough, shed too many tears over blood that had been spilled and could never be recovered, blood they could no longer stop from flowing. Profiteers, politicians, every kind of mercenary, workers spoiled by high wages, who all thought only of themselves and left the front lines twitching, bleeding and dying. ‘And why?’ thought Bernard. ‘It’s pointless: no one will win. Everyone is exhausted. Each country will end up back on its own borders, but drained, spent, dying. And in the meantime, the civilians are still alive. While we’re rotting away in the trenches,’ he continued thinking, ‘those nights in the trenches, long nights on sentry duty, or that instant just before the battle: ominous moments you could never forget.’
    He thought all of this as he walked along the road, among the other soldiers moving fast like him, suffering like him. No one could help him. No one could make his cross any lighter to bear.
    ‘It’s so heavy,’ sighed Bernard in a kind of delirium, tottering beneath the weight of the military kit he was still carrying over his bloody shoulder. Those poor guys! How could they possibly help me? Some of them are worse off than me. Me, me … But I’m nothing. Whether I live or die means nothing. All the civilians with their lies: “Heroes, Honour … giving your life for your country …” To tell the truth, they don’t even really need me. Modern warfare requires machines. An entire battalion of heroes would be better off replaced by a perfect armoured tank that, without patriotism, without faith or courage, would annihilate as many of the enemy as possible. And the civilians can sense that. They keep on saying that they love us, admire us, but it’s just what they’re expected to say; all of them are thinking that we’re nothing and they know that even an inanimate machine is more valuable than we are. That’s what is so serious. We usedto be real men … But since we can’t turn ourselves into machines, since we’re no longer really men, we feel degraded, as if we were beasts. What is it they say? “Don’t try to understand. Don’t think.” Become mindless! We have to be like that dead horse,’ he said, staring at it.
    They were scattered everywhere along the road, cadavers with long teeth, wounded horses, worn-out horses, some disembowelled by an exploding shell, all that remained of an English regiment in retreat. Such a confusion of races, of blood, of languages surrounded Bernard! He saw Scotsmen, Hindus, Africans, German prisoners. All these different faces had the same expression: a kind of exhausted grimace that gave their young faces the look of death. Of hell … And a few kilometres from there, in Paris …‘No! Paris has been bombed. They are suffering there too … But further away, in the cities … in Cannes … Or the cool, beautiful houses in Geneva … in Madrid … in the United States, where the young men are well out of it, young men who can swim in the sea or drink chilled punch … Oh, just to eat some