Thursday 7 September 2017

...of names

How many have been killed? How many are still able to fight? After what we’ve seen - that deadly cloud wafting slowly towards us, yellow and golden brown like a sunset - we remain hunkered down in our holes, tirelessly scrutinizing the sky, day and night. We count our ranks, maybe in the hopes of making those who are absent, whose names no longer belong to anyone, reappear: ’Simon, Lenfant, Garadec, Schaffer… and Adrien, and the little redhead - Gordon, that was his name, Gordon … and Pommier, Antoine who was from Joliette, but whose family name I’ve forgotten, and Léon Berre and Raymond, Dubois, Santeuil, Reinert… ‘ Are they really names? Did they really exist? We thought of death differently when we first arrived from so far away: glorious death out in broad daylight, a star of blood on one’s chest. But death is deceitful and insidious, it sneaks up, whisks men away in the night while they’re sleeping, unbeknownst to others. It drowns men in the bogs, in the muddy pools at the bottom of ravines, it smothers them in the earth, it spreads its icy fingers into the bodies of those who are lying in lazarettos, under torn tents, those with livid faces and emaciated chests, wasted from dysentery, from pneumonia, from typhus. Those who die vanish and one day we notice their absence. Where are they? Maybe they’ve been lucky enough to be sent to the rear, maybe they’ve lost an eye, a leg, maybe they’ll never go back to war. But something tells us, something about their absence, about the silence that surrounds their names: they’re dead.

[The Prospector, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]

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