“Other way, cadet!” shouted Armand. “Shovelfuls are cast in the direction of the enemy. That way you’ll have a mound of earth to conceal you more quickly.”
I said nothing for a moment as I took in the instructions. Another shot. I began digging even more frenetically. It isn’t until you try making a hole to fit an entire body in that you realize what a task it is. Roots as thick as arms appeared.
“Roots!” I cried in desperation. “How do I cut them?”
Everything I said struck the brothers as hilarious.
“Well, of course there are roots! So it goes with this strange French soil of ours: The roots grow beneath the ground, not over it,” said a laughing Armand, thrusting the ramrod down the rifle’s barrel.
“No scissors?” shouted Zeno, getting in on the joke. “No? Shame! Well, now you know what your job is before bedtime: Sharpen your spade, precisely for this hallowed task.”
I continued to dig, down on my knees now so as to make a less visible target of myself. More shots. One so close that soil erupted over my helmet. I finally managed to open up a cavity into which I could just about fit. I was gasping and exhausted.
Armand came over. “Cadet: Change out of those clothes, wash your face and your armpits, and to the study room.”
I was defeated. And that first day, after Fieldwork, I still had to carry on paying attention in class.
“Obey and Command” had to do with a classical precept of Quintus Ennius, Appian, or some such Roman or Greek: “Before you can command, you must learn to obey.” The subject came to be an addendum to Practical Fieldwork, the idea being that the blisters on your hands would help instruct you about what you might reasonably expect from men.
History classes. For the Ducroix brothers, “Universal” History was the history of France; France and who else? Ah, yes, don’t forget France. Then there was a trifling corner, somewhere beyond the king’s borders, an unimportant wayside known as “the world.” This far-off land merited a tenth of the lessons, and then only when the Parthians were laying siege to Palmyra, or when Cato said to the Roman senate that in order to ensure a good crop of prickly pears, Carthage would have to be sown with salt. To begin with, I made my skepticism clear, but one day, when Zeno claimed that Arquimedex (they pronounced and wrote it like this, with an X at the end) had Gallic origins, I did not stop him. In general, the French are more open-spirited than people think. True, you shouldn’t ever attempt to convince them that perhaps, only perhaps, and according to the opinion of some cartographers who know a little about the subject, Paris is not at the geographical center of Planet Earth. They will not argue with you but simply think you are a poor lost soul.
Being the good Frenchmen that they were, they started with the siege of Alesia. Caesar surrounded Alesia with a twenty-mile-long palisade and then another around that, twice as long, to stop reinforcements from getting in. What did I care about Alesia, Caesar, and Vercingetorix? Hard as I tried, at that point in the never-ending day, my eyelids began to droop, and my arms became deadweights. I rejoiced when supper was announced! Before going to the dining hall, I asked them: “Were you really shooting at me?”
“Well,” said Zeno, “we try to create a situation with the haze of smoke, and the havoc, of an actual war. We don’t necessarily aim at the body.”
“But you could have killed me! At a hundred feet, a rifle is hardly accurate.”
Shrugging, they continued their conversation. Those Ducroix! What a pair.
Usually, I ate on my own in the kitchens. By the time I came to sit, the servants had been abed a good while. In my corner were fruit and a small cooking pot; I served myself. My fingers were trembling from wielding those hulking picks and spades. The edges of the helmet had chafed my temples, as though I’d been wearing a crown of thorns. At around midnight, when I was just biting into an apple, Armand appeared. “Cadet, outside.”
“You’re joking,” I snapped. “But I’m more dead than alive!”
“I believe I remember you yourself agreeing to the study plan,” said Armand. “Do you think your enemy cares a jot as to your physical and mental state?” He examined my head. “I suggest that you put some wadding around your head before putting the helmet back on. That’s what wadding was invented for. Go on, then, allez!”
And back to the field we went.
Once I was in the hole, I had to dig following the line of lime. I don’t think I could have covered even ten feet in an hour. The pick, the spade, the helmet. Those round wicker baskets, which I had to call fajinas or be punished. Fajina, fajina, more fajinas. And the brothers’ rifle. Each time a fajina appeared, full of earth and forming a parapet beside the trench, Armand would take aim. And those were the conditions I had to work in! I learned very quickly to hide my hands, holding the fajina by the base and from behind, so as not to give the shooter a target.
Next day, more of the same. Drawing, studying, fieldwork, studying, fieldwork, retreat practice. And back to the beginning again. I did not have it in me to try and importune Jeanne, I was that shattered. I fell leadlike into bed every night and woke only when the castle bells rang out — very sonorous they were, and positioned (by design, no doubt) — directly above my room. And this was merely the beginning.
As tutors, I have to say, the Ducroix brothers were the best; their methods, the most demanding. Pay attention! Spherical Room. Be constantly attentive, whether in there or in any other place! Geometry. Ballistics. Mineralogy. Fieldwork. Allez!
One day, a fortnight in, I came close to insurrection. It rained the whole day through; plainly, that was no obstacle to the unaltered continuation of field drills. The pick sank into the trench wall, but the earth, compacted by the rain, didn’t budge. My body was covered in a thick sludge, a ballast of viscid mud I had to haul around, becoming heavier and heavier. The rain came down ever harder, torrential cascades pouring over the edges of my helmet. There was a foot of water covering the ground, and my shoes were full up. To top things off, the drill lasted half an hour longer than usual. I remember looking skyward, up at those filthy weeping clouds. The skies of France, ah, yes, that gray so sweet and cruel. A shot hitting the cylinder of one of the fajinas brought me back to reality.
By the end, I was so destroyed that I could not lift myself out of my hole, which had been growing deeper, wider, and more than anything, longer. Armand did not deign to help me out. I managed to get my arms and head out, complete with that cumbersome helmet, the thick drops of rain bouncing off it.
“And you want me to be constantly attentive?” I protested. “But dear God! Do you not see, if I die, there is little chance of my paying any attention to anything!”
Armand knelt down on the edge of the trench, his nose right up close to my iron visor. The delicate man I thought I’d met that first day had quite disappeared. Even the rain seemed to fall on him in a respectful manner, running down the bald sphere of his head and, when it reached his cheek, draining neatly off through his goatee.
“As long as you are alive, you must pay attention. And as long as you pay attention, you’ll stay alive. Now, out of the trench.”
“I cannot.” I held out my hand to him. “Help me, I cannot.”
“Not true. You can. Do it.”
“I cannot!”
He shrugged and got to his feet, shouldering the rifle. “Given that you insist on this laziness, I hereby suspend my academic powers. I can give orders to a thinking mind, never to a stomach or a back. And given that your belly prefers fasting over dinner, and your back the mud rather than a decent bed, well, I wish you a very good night, my dear cadet.”