After almost two years of fighting, with increased recruitment a constant drain on the country, there were even fewer people in the streets, whether it was Sunday or not. And not even many women or children anymore, given the cost of living and the difficulties in shopping, because women received only the wartime allowance at best and in the absence of husbands and brothers, many had had to find work: posting bills, delivering mail, punching tickets, or driving locomotives, when they didn’t wind up in factories, armaments plants in particular. No longer going to school, the children had plenty to keep them busy too: much in demand from the age of eleven on, they replaced their elders in businesses as well as in the fields outside the city, where they worked horses, threshed grain, cared for livestock. That left mostly the elderly, the marginal, a few invalids like Anthime, and some dogs on leashes or on the loose.
One of those strays, in the excitement of its sexual arousal by another mutt across the street on the Quai de la Fosse, ran clumsily into a wheel of the baby carriage, which teetered threateningly for an instant until a swift kick from Blanche’s high heel sent the culprit off squealing. After making sure that the young woman had the situation in hand and that his niece had not awakened, Anthime watched the woebegone animal—now tacking from one curb to the other, its erection maintained but useless now that its heart’s desire had vanished during the carriage incident—until it disappeared at the corner of the Rue de la Verrerie.
12
ANIMALS, WELL, ANTHIME HAD seen a lot of them, of all sorts, during those five hundred days. Because although war prefers cities—besieging, invading, bombing, burning—it is waged in large part in the countryside as well, where beasts are simply a given.
First off, the useful animals: those one works or eats or both, currently abandoned by peasants fleeing their farms turned into combat zones, their buildings ablaze, their fields cratered by shells, their poultry and livestock left behind. In theory, the territorial soldiers were responsible for rounding up these creatures, but that was easier said than done with unclaimed cattle, soon eager to return to a wild state that quickly turned them touchy, especially the bulls, vindictive and impossible to catch. Nor was it a small job for the territorials, even those with a rural background, to gather all the sheep gone roaming along roads in ruins, the wandering pigs, the ducks, chickens, and roosters left to their own devices, the rabbits without any fixed domicile.
These now itinerant species could at least serve, on occasion, to vary the monotonous diet of the troops. Wine was no longer a problem, since it was now widely distributed by the quartermaster corps along with brandy, for the high command was increasingly convinced that inebriating its soldiers helped bolster their courage and, above all, reduce their awareness of their condition. A chance encounter one fine day with a disoriented goose, on the other hand, made a small change from yesterday’s bread, cold soup, and tinned beef, and every animal so recuperated thus became a potential feast. Sometimes, driven by hunger and professionally assisted by Padioleau, who enjoyed exercising his butchering skills, Arcenel and Bossis would even carve a few ribs out of a living ox, then leave him to manage on his own. Foragers went so far as to slaughter and devour without qualm idle, bewildered horses, now deprived of their purpose in life, in any case, and upset at no longer having barges to haul along the canal of the Meuse River.
It wasn’t just serviceable and edible animals that the men ran into now and then, however. They met up with more familiar ones as well, domestic and even decorative animals that were even more used to their creature comforts: cats and dogs left ownerless after the civilian exodus, without collars or the tiniest daily guaranteed saucer of food, gradually forgetting even the names they’d been given. There were caged birds as well, household pets such as turtledoves, even lawn ornaments like peacocks, for example, which no one ordinarily eats and anyway, given their lousy dispositions and hopeless narcissism, they had no chance whatsoever of pulling through on their own. In general, the military did not spontaneously come up with the idea of dining off that last category of animals, at least in the beginning. It might so happen, though, that soldiers would decide to keep one for company, sometimes for only a few days, and adopt a cat they found wandering in a communication trench as a company mascot.
On the other hand, cavorting around or burrowed in outside the fixed, static, bogged-down ground plan of the trenches, there were wild animals too, and that was an entirely different business. Before the fields and forests had been razed and smashed to pieces by artillery fire—the fields turned to Martian deserts, the woods reduced to ragged stumps—they had harbored, at least for a little while longer, freelance animals never enslaved by men either in peacetime or in war, at liberty to live as they pleased, unfettered by any code of labor. Among these creatures a decent crop of edible bodies was still available: hares, deer, or wild boar—promptly shot even though hunting was strictly forbidden during wartime, polished off à la bayonet, chopped up with an ax or trench knife—that sometimes provided soldiers with a windfall of alimentary extras.
The same thing happened to birds or frogs, tracked and harvested during the soldiers’ off-hours, and to every kind of trout, carp, tench, and pike they fished for with grenades whenever encamped beside running water, and to bees if by some miracle they found a hive not yet completely deserted. Last on the list came the marginal creatures, declared inedible by some vague interdict or other, such as foxes, crows, weasels, moles: as for them, although they were for obscure reasons pronounced unfit for consumption, it seems the troops became less and less finicky in this regard and that every once in a while they managed, by means of a ragout, to make an exception for hedgehogs. Like the other animals, however, these would soon become scarce on the ground after the invention and swift application of poison gases throughout the theater of operations.
But there’s more to life than eating. Because in the case of armed conflict, the animal kingdom provides some members that can be too useful as potential warriors to be eaten and these are recruited by force for their aptitude for service, such as militarized horses, dogs, or pigeons: some beasts are ridden by noncoms or set to pulling wagons, others are trained to attack, or haul machine guns, while in the bird department, squadrons of globe-trotting pigeons are promoted to the rank of courier.
Last of all and alas, above all, came innumerable creatures of the tiniest size and most redoubtable nature: all sorts of die-hard parasites that, not content with offering no nutritional value whatsoever, on the contrary themselves feed voraciously on the troops. First in line, the insects: fleas, bedbugs, mosquitoes, gnats, and flies that settle in clouds on the eyes—those choice bits—of corpses. And let’s not forget that parasitic arachnid, the tick. Still, the men could have coped with them all, but there was one adversary that quickly became a perpetual and utter scourge: the louse. A prolific champion, this insect in its fraternity of millions soon completely covered everybody. The other main enemy was the rat, no less gluttonous and just as omnipresent as the louse, equally expert at reproduction, but a specialist in fattening up, hell-bent on devouring the soldiers’ provisions—including those hung preventively from a nail—or nibbling on leather straps, attacking even your shoes and your very body when you’re asleep, and fighting with the flies for your eyeballs when you’re dead.