War Read online

  Already, there is almost no-one left. There are only these ceaselessly intersecting movements, these machines equipped with two legs that straddle the ground, and two feet that slap the cement and tar. The noise has filled the world, leaving no room for anything else. The noise has driven all words and thoughts very far away, and replaced them by systems. Everything, today, is noise – even the silence. The roadway’s black river is a permanent snarl over which the snarls of the cars and lorries glide. The outstretched branches of the trees vibrate. The white buildings hundreds of feet high are vertical howls, each window a loud noise opening up in the muttering air. The light explodes as it falls, the black shadows are blobs pressing against the ear-drums. Very far away, beyond the thunderous city, there are the dull thuds that echo from the bald mountains, there is the sea’s rumination. Each man, as you can see, is a cry. They wander around the labyrinth, emitting strangled cries:

  ‘Ho!’

  ‘Hey there!’

  ‘Psst!’

  ‘Wow!’

  ‘Hallo?’

  ‘OK! OK!’

  And across the face of the earth there is this great distant vibration, this membrane sending out its countless ultrasonics, and at its centre the sun’s searing scream.

  Perhaps one day there will be a face, a real face, that one could spend centuries decoding. It will not move. It will not blink its eyelids. It will not make grimaces. It will not peer anxiously to the left and to the right, on the lookout for danger. A face one will be able to read, line by line, without its melting away among the other surging faces. Maybe it will be the face of Monsieur X, or of some unknown girl. Then, there will be no further need to prowl the streets. It will suffice to shut oneself in one’s room, and to look at oneself, and it will be like a mirror.

  That is the way the girl called Bea B. travelled around, in the centre of town. She traversed the noise’s turbulence, made her own way through the light and movement. She offered her body to the terrible blows that rained down from all sides. But she had already lost consciousness, unless she had simply ceased to struggle. She walked with the others, in the sun, listening to all the noises. They entered her endlessly, intoxicatingly. Never before had there been so many forces at play in the world, so much power. Everything, every living thing, had its own weight, was buttressed. It was like a battle, when the shells crash to earth, opening up dusty craters. One could not fail to see the machines with sweating muscles working at full pitch. A bus passed down the street, its metal panels and its windows rattling away. The girl looked at the bus, and she knew that it was eternal, so to speak, a truth, a truth with broad tyres resting upon the earth, a truth that was a war-cry.

  An aeroplane flew high in the sky, a cross of white metal against all the blue. She stared after it as though it had no right to disappear, as though it were the true sign, awaited since time immemorial, that was about to proclaim to mankind some astonishing piece of news.

  As the girl crossed the street, she glowed in the light. Mirrors fixed to walls, and the plate-glass windows of a flower shop, allowed her to see herself arrive, walking slightly askew, with her white legs moving past each other, her body clad in a light-coloured dress, her face modelled by the shadows and by her long hair swaying around her neck. And she too was a noise, the tick of a metronome, a deep murmur that wanted to say so many things to the world:

  ‘I like noises, all the noises. There are people who say that some noises are hideous and others beautiful. But personally I like all the noises. There are people who listen only to particular noises. But personally I listen to all the noises. There are people who say that certain things are noises, while other things are not noises but music, for instance, or poetry, or moans of love. But I say that all noises are noises.’

  She saw them arriving from far away. She gave them orders, made them circle around. Each time an engine rent the atmosphere with its shrill shriek, her face assumed a sort of smile, and her eyelids blinked rapidly. Each time there was a traffic jam behind a stationary lorry, she stood at the edge of the pavement and opened a mouth deep down in her guts: then the many hooters all began screeching in unison, and it was no longer possible to feel sad, or lonely, or forlorn.

  The noises brought the great walls crashing down. The noises respected nothing. Standing on the road’s shattered surface, a man with red, sweat-streaked skin pushed a small lever down and immediately his pneumatic drill went into action. The iron point quivered as it penetrated the bituminous crust. Black dust rose in the air, while fragments flew in all directions. Then, all of a sudden, there was no more emptiness, no more desperate hope, no more demons or gods, no more spirals of nebulae floating in the dark vertigo. The world was a slab of earth being ripped up, desires were shudders travelling up a steel machine, men ceased to be vague, their thoughts became precise, went stubbornly to work at one single point of the globe, and words filled the four corners of the room-like space with snarls of hatred and violence.

  Now and then, I step out of myself and hurl my shape against a brick wall. After throwing it, I nail it to the wall. I do not do that with my thoughts or my desires. I do it simply as one would undress before going to bed. I tear off the image of my body and my face, and spit it onto a hard surface. I remove my eyes, and there they are: two glass spheres shining in the centre of my shadow. I strip myself quickly, quickly, with rage and exultation, with misfortune, with every possible misfortune. And naturally, when I hurl my body, thus, against the brick wall, I also hurl all that my body contains. I expectorate all knowledge. I have not read, I have not lived, I have not known, I have not experienced birth. All these years, all these days, all these words, there, there! Plastered in outline against the rampart’s surface, exiled there. What! Is that all it was? This absurd silhouette, this smudge, this grimace! All the hopes, fears, systems! It was so small, after all! It stuck fast against the patch of wall, it could adhere so easily, with its hairs and its scales! It could so easily be hidden! Then, from the other side, at that point in empty space where I am no longer to be found, a strange wind starts blowing, a wind that prods and hurts, a throbbing of the air that is neither foreboding nor pain, but, of all things, laughter, LAUGHTER!

  At dawn the next morning, the Carthaginians applied themselves to collecting the spoils and viewing the carnage, which even to an enemy’s eyes was a shocking spectacle. All over the field Roman soldiers lay dead in their thousands, horse and foot mingled, as the shifting phases of the battle, or the attempt to escape, had brought them together. Here and there wounded men, covered with blood, who had been roused to consciousness by the morning cold, were dispatched by a quick blow as they struggled to rise from among the corpses; others were found still alive with the sinews in their thighs and behind their knees sliced through, baring their throats and necks and begging who would to spill what little blood they had left. Some had their heads buried in the ground, having apparently dug themselves holes and by smothering their faces with earth had choked themselves to death. Most strange of all was a Numidian soldier, still living, and lying, with nose and ears horribly lacerated, underneath the body of a Roman who, when his useless hands had no longer been able to grasp his sword, had died in the act of tearing his enemy, in bestial fury, with his teeth.

  Livy.

  TEN THOUSAND YEARS of history: ten thousand years of war. Above the mud-coloured earth, aeroplanes fly ponderously, carrying their cargo of bombs. Occasionally it is possible to make out the threads of roads, the filaments of railway tracks. Or else a sort of greyish patch, made up of thousands of tiny cubes huddled together, stretching the length of a valley like some kind of mildew. The bare quadrilaterals of airfields slip slowly into the distance. Columns of pale smoke rise straight upwards from the heart of the forest. The bombs explode in silence, sending up series of smoke-wreaths that hover motionlessly above the ground. The world is a puddle of foul slime. The plane’s nose thrusts forward, on and on, through the troubled, bubble-streaked air. It is searching to destroy.
It is prowling at 25,000 feet above the muddy canopy, and its shadow flits across the tree-tops. The clouds divide, then re-mass. Occasionally a storm breaks out, below, and lightning flashes puncture the mist.

  In the lush fields, men have been fighting for days, years, centuries. They crawl, they slither along ditches, sub-machine-guns clutched in their fists. They creep forwards on all fours, making no sound at all. Their eyes search for anything that moves or glints. There is some mysterious secret factor within them that commands them to advance, to crawl just a little farther still. Above their heads, the sky is empty. They listen to the blood pulsing through their arteries, in their necks, their chests, their groins. The sweat pours off them.

  They have been fighting for so long, now. They no longer know why, having forgotten the reason. But did they ever really know? The earth, the whole earth is a reason for fighting. So are life’s gestures, the birds that fly, the squeals of dogs and pigs.

  Those who imagine that they command these legions are mistaken. They yell out their orders, they study their maps and yell:

  ‘Advance!’

  But the conflict is so old that their orders are no longer of the least importance. History is spread over the ground, here, and the hordes of tiny men are converging upon it. The groups seek each other out, cross paths, clash, slaughter. They race across steppes on horseback, hurry down hills and mountain streams. They mass along opposite river banks, then abruptly at midday they utter piercing cries and fall on each other.

  In the forest, they glide along like snakes. Their naked bodies are painted with red and black tattoos. Perhaps it is always the same man fighting. Suddenly he stands up in the centre of the clearing, brandishes his spear and runs off quickly into the bush. His painted mask remains rigid, stuck to the face’s skin. If only one could stop him, if only one could rip off his countenance with its glinting eyes. ‘Stop, Monsieur X! Stop a moment! Look around you! Stop a moment, and look!’ But he does not listen. He heads into the wind, brandishing his spear above his head. And here his very image appears before him. A man looking just like him, painted red and black. The two savage forms leap at each other. When they meet, there is this fraction of time during which they are floating and dancing in space, while the two spears clash together. Then they separate, and now it can be seen that one of the men is sprawled in the grass, and that his flank is pierced by a large red hole.

  Or else he has put on an iron mask with slits for eyes, and a heavy coat of mail. The clanking of old iron accompanies him as he walks. His feet shod with steel boots thud into the ground. He cleaves the air, a figure-head of silence. His breath hisses through the chinks in his helmet, and his spurs click. Above his head, the man’s mailed gauntlet waves a sharp sword that flashes in the sun. ‘Monsieur X, what are you doing? Look at the sun shining on your iron sword! Look! I beg you, stop and watch the sun’s reflection on your sword!’ But he does not look. Through the slits in his helmet, his eyes can be seen sparkling. The man follows his eyes, striking the ground with his steel feet as he walks straight ahead. And, always, there looms the image of the other, the one who seems to be emerging from a very limpid mirror, who is advancing to meet him, brandishing an identical sword. The blades clash, draw sparks from the helmets as they glance off them. The points seek to penetrate the coats of mail, to prise off the helmets. Finally, one of the two crashes heavily backwards. And the sword’s blade plunges between the helmet and the coat of mail, at the neck, and severs the carotid artery. Then the man goes away, and the other one, on the ground, dies imprisoned in his metal shell, his face still hidden.

  The war never stops. It sweeps continuously through the world, with all its ships, its horses, its tanks, and its aeroplanes. Endless noise rises from the fields and valleys, deep growls, explosions, shattering cries, the whistling of bullets. At night, the forests suddenly glow in the light of flames, and during the day, columns of black smoke obscure the sun. Perhaps there has never been peace on earth, perhaps silence has never existed.

  The armies march towards each other, they descend the flanks of the mountain. But there is never any sign of real hatred. All that can be seen is this mechanical movement, this calm movement which governs the troops’ deployment. If there were hatred, or anger, everything would be very simple. But there is never any anger. The violence is mysterious, forging ahead according to a plan that nobody knows. All is precise, evident. The ground is like a desert, mile upon mile of naked stone. And the air: transparent, dry, hard. And the water, and the sun: they show no signs.

  Sometimes Monsieur X lifts his head and looks up at the sky. But he sees nothing intelligible written there. So he goes on walking. His clothes are glued to his skin with sweat, his face cleaves the air without receiving blows. His feet strike the ground rhythmically, advance along the pathway bordered by tall grass. When one is a soldier, and making war, life is one unbroken march towards a meeting with empty space. Day after day, one passes villages, watering points, camps. But there is always farther to go. The reason always lies beyond, on the other side of the river, then on the other side of the hill, then on the other side of the ricefields.

  The lorries rumble along the dust-track, crossing bridges, fording streams. From time to time there is an engagement. Sub-machine-guns crackle a few miles away. Shells dig craters. And when one arrives, it is already over. There is nothing.

  In the evening, sitting on the ground, while mosquitoes swarm around, there is time to write by lamp-light:

  Dear Bea B.

  I have been here about a month, and it has all been very interesting and instructive. Maybe you could arrange to come out here, to see what war is like, what really happens. I have taken part in two operations. The first was with the Marines, near Da Nang. We passed through several villages with our tanks. Apparently the people there were allies. I always thought that, when soldiers went off to war, the girls came running up in the street, throwing flowers and kisses, and that the old folk waved their hands and uttered cries of encouragement. But here, the people looked on with an air of suspicion and bewilderment and stupor, while the column of tanks and soldiers made its way through their peaceful little villages, or through their fields of rice and their cemeteries.

  One morning we sat on a hill-top and looked down, like kings of old, at the battle raging in the valley below, though it was not really a battle, just a wave of aeroplanes dropping napalm, 2,000-pound bombs, high explosives, phosphorus bombs, and so on, on everything that moved. Despite the fact that this was apparently a pacified sector. That’s to say, they had first parachuted leaflets over the entire area, to warn all opponents of the Viet Cong to leave their little villages and their ricefields, and go to a refugee camp – something little better than a concentration camp, here. Unfortunately, it seems that half the leaflets never reached their destinations. Most of the villagers were working in the fields when the bombs started dropping.

  The following day, there had been a clash, and the Marines had suffered a few casualties. Three men suspected of being Viet Cong had been brought in from a nearby village. All three were over sixty-five, less than five feet tall, and barefoot: the enemy, theoretically. The Marines went mad with rage when they saw them, and uttered strange curses such as ‘off the motherfuckers’ and ‘zap the slit-eyed gooks’. One soldier smashed the butt of his rifle into the face of the oldest (who must have been in his seventies), crushing one eye. The following day, after a night spent in the cemetery, we systematically burned every house in the village. The heaps of gathered rice were burned, the furniture smashed and burned too. The pigs were shot with rifles, the reservoirs smashed, the women and children herded forcibly into carts and led off to camps. I don’t know how many of these peasants were pro-Viet Cong before the Marines arrived, but I’m sure they were all supporters by the time the Marines had left.

  Last week, I was present at one of the worst defeats the US has suffered since the war started, when about eighty of our men were killed in the high central plains. The U
S Command refused to admit it was a defeat, and claimed unofficially that 475 North Vietnamese infiltrators had been killed during the battle. I was there when a reconnaissance party was sent out to make a body-count, and it found nothing apart from four recently-dug graves. The official score was finally fixed at 106, but it all goes to show how badly the war is going for the Americans, and how dishonestly it is being reported. Most of the papers give the impression that everything is going fine and that the Viet Cong are practically finished, but it isn’t true. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese may not be able to gain a military victory, in face of the overwhelming US superiority in manpower and sophisticated weaponry. But even so, I am convinced that the US cannot hold out here for very much longer. Hope to see you soon. X.

  A later letter, typed out on sheets of airmail paper, continued:

  3 march 1968

  dear bea b.

  first of all, please excuse any typing errors. i am sitting by the hotel swimming-pool and there are so many chicks in bikinis parading to and fro that it is a bit difficult to concentrate. plus the fact that the shift-key on my typewriter is broken so i cannot make capitals etc.

  i expect you have been following some of the news about these latest setbacks in the vietnam debacle. i was not in saigon when the attacks were launched, i was in the montagnard capital, ban me thuot, where a good deal of fighting and destruction took place as well, the south vietnamese airforce dropped napalm on some areas of the town; when i think about it i cannot recall any other example of government forces bombing their own partisans. still, ban me thuot was a picnic compared with hue – apart from the massacre of a few missionaries by the viet cong, and that probably convinced the americans that right was on their side,

  i spent a week with the marines inside the citadel of hue, and it was the most thrilling revealing week i have spent in vietnam so far. the americans call this a limited war so i would hate to think what they consider to be a total war. how can you improve on dropping 1000-pound bombs on a town, except i suppose by dropping 2000-pound bombs. for a conservative like myself, the most tragic thing of all, perhaps, was the wholesale and wanton destruction of vietnams one fine historical city. it was as though someone decided to wipe out oxford, cambridge, edinburgh and westminster at one go.