1914

As if equally possessed by two opposite certainties and at the same time completely aware of these anomalies, Anthime was afraid that others could see this and that pitying him, no one dared mention it—just as Anthime himself didn’t dare confide in Padioleau, who was precisely the only one of his companions unable to notice these problems. Problems that worsened and complicated Anthime’s life, becoming so invasive that he could no longer confront them alone, no longer grapple with them without asking for help. He finally admitted his misgivings to Blanche, who revealed that she had indeed seen what was going on and then encouraged him, naturally, to consult Monteil.

So Anthime found himself again in the doctor’s office, explaining things to him while pointing with his left hand to his missing right arm the way one points at a silent witness, an accomplice a trifle ashamed to be there—while Monteil, frowning attentively as he listened, stared out his office window at a view in which nothing, as usual, was going on or past. Anthime having stated his case, Monteil looked thoughtful for a while before delivering himself of a little speech. This sort of thing happens frequently, he began, and a great deal of anecdotal evidence exists. It’s the old story of the phantom limb. It can happen that the perception and sensation of a lost body part will linger on, then disappear after a few months. But it can also happen—which seemed to be Anthime’s case—that this body part reasserts its presence in the body long after its loss.

The doctor then developed this speech in the classic manner by calling upon statistics (the upper right limb is, for eight out of ten of us, the most adroit), historical anecdotes (Admiral Nelson, after losing his right arm in the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and experiencing the same suffering bedeviling Anthime, considered it proof of the existence of the soul), dull jokes (one places a wedding band on the ring finger of the left hand, which then requires the right one to help remove it: the dilemma of the one-armed adulterer), bloodcurdling comparisons (certain penis amputees have spoken of phantom erections and ejaculations), clinical frankness (the cause of these pains is as mysterious as the phenomenon itself), and perspectives that are both semi-reassuring (it will go away on its own, it usually diminishes with time) and semi-worrisome (although it can also last for twenty-five years, that’s not unheard-of).

Oh, by the way, Paris, wound up Monteil, when are you going there with Blanche? And the following week they arrived in the Gare Montparnasse, after Anthime had read every last newspaper on the train. Upon his return home from the front, he hadn’t wanted to keep up with the news, or at least hadn’t shown the slightest interest in the press—although he would sometimes leaf through a paper on the sly—but now, in their compartment, he borrowed the dailies from Blanche and plunged into the events of the day, focused entirely on the war. We were then in its fourth year, well after the particularly murderous business of the Chemin des Dames, the explosive events in Russia, and the first mutinies.[13] Anthime read about all that with close attention.

Blanche had reserved two rooms at the other end of Paris in a hotel run by some family cousins, so they took a taxi at Montparnasse and, as it passed in front of the Gare de l’Est, they saw groups of men on leave milling about, either arriving from the battlefield or on their way back, possibly drunk but certainly vehement, looking angry, singing songs the couple could not clearly hear. Anthime asked the driver to stop the taxi for a moment, got out, and went over to the main entrance hall of the station, where he watched the bands of soldiers for a few minutes. Some of them were singing seditious songs off-key, and Anthime recognized “The Internationale”, which opens martially in an ascending fourth, as do quite a few songs and hymns of a patriotic, bellicose, or partisan nature. Anthime stood perfectly still and his face showed no expression as he raised his right fist in solidarity, but no one saw him do it.

At the hotel the cousins showed them to their rooms, which were across the corridor from each other. Leaving their luggage there, Blanche and Anthime freshened up, then went out for a walk before going to dinner. Later, after each had retired to bed, there was every indication that they would both sleep in their separate rooms except that in the middle of the night Anthime woke up. He rose, crossed the corridor, pushed open Blanche’s door, and went in the darkness toward the bed where she wasn’t sleeping either. He lay down beside her, took her in his arm, then entered and impregnated her. And the following autumn, during the very battle at Mons[14] that turned out to be the last one, a male infant was born who was given the name Charles.

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Copyright

NEW YORK

LONDON

The New Press gratefully acknowledges the Florence Gould Foundation for supporting the publication of this book.

© 2012 by Les Éditions de Minuit

English translation © 2014 by The New Press

All rights reserved.

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Originally published in France as 14 by Les Éditions de Minuit, 7, rue Bernard-Palissy, 75006, Paris, 2012 Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2014

Distributed by Perseus Distribution

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Echenoz, Jean.

[14. English]

1914 : a novel / Jean Echenoz ; Translated from the French by Linda Coverdale.

13

Chemin des Dames: The Chemin des Dames is nineteen miles long, running east and west along a ridge between two river valleys. “The Ladies’ Path” was the carriage road taken in the eighteenth century by the daughters of Louis XV when traveling between Paris and the Château de Boves, but in World War I it lay in a strategic sector held by the French army on the Western Front. Pushing the invaders back after the Battle of the Marne, the Allied armies were finally halted on the ridge in September 1914 in the First Battle of the Aisne River, and by the end of January 1915 the Germans controlled that plateau. The front line remained essentially static—but not without casualties—until the Second Battle of the Aisne (April 16–25, 1917), when in what had been presented as a final French offensive for victory, General Nivelle threw seven army corps against the Chemin des Dames ridge, where the Germans were well dug in and had the high-ground advantage. After twelve days of fighting, the attackers had gained little and suffered such high casualties that the French public, kept informed by the newspapers, was outraged. After the massive losses in the battles of Verdun and the Somme, the toll taken at the Chemin des Dames shattered the morale of the disillusioned French troops. By early 1917, almost a million French soldiers had been killed in the war; those still alive were sick of the suicidal attacks demanded by their high command.

The French Army Mutinies of 1917—the startling extent of which was hidden from the public at the time—began after the debacle of the Second Battle of the Aisne: French troops at the Chemin des Dames had been deserting in increasing numbers, but deserters became mutineers as soldiers refused to obey orders for further futile assaults. Revolution was in the air: Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, had abdicated on March 2, 1917, and a month later, units of Allied Russian soldiers among the Chemin des Dames troops were singing “The Internationale.” In the end, almost half the French infantry at the Western Front may have taken part in insubordination at some point, encouraged at times by the stunning example of the Russian Revolution, news of which was spread by socialist newspapers and the infantry rumor mills.

14

Mons: Mons is the capital of the Belgian province of Hainaut, where the British Expeditionary Force fought its first battle of the Great War on August 23 and 24, 1914, against the advancing German First Army. Outnumbered by three to one, and left vulnerable when the sudden retreat of the French Fifth Army exposed their right flank, the British withdrew in good order for more than 250 miles, hard-pressed by the Germans, all the way to the outskirts of Paris. There, together with six French field armies, they were at last able to reverse the Allies’ fortunes at the last-ditch Battle of the Marne and begin driving the Germans back to what would become the infamous trenches of the Western Front.

During the Hundred Days Offensive (August 8–November 11, 1918), beginning with the Battle of Amiens, a series of Allied attacks forced the Central Powers to retreat behind the “impregnable” Hindenburg Line—permanently breached in September—and ultimately to accept an armistice. As part of this offensive, the Canadian Corps of the British First Army fought a number of battles along the Western Front from Amiens to Mons, where a memorial plaque in the city hall bears the inscription: MONS WAS RECAPTURED BY THE CANADIAN CORPS ON THE 11TH NOVEMBER 1918: AFTER FIFTY MONTHS OF GERMAN OCCUPATION, FREEDOM WAS RESTORED TO THE CITY: HERE WAS FIRED THE LAST SHOT OF THE GREAT WAR.