Read Journey to the End of the Night for Free Online Page A

only for one night, we'd be able to sleep with body and soul. This food supply business was just one more nightmare, a nasty little monster on top of the big one, the war. Brutes to the right of us, brutes to the left of us, they were all over the place. Condemned to a deferred death, the only thing that really mattered was an enormous longing for sleep, all the rest was torture, even the time and effort it took to eat. A bend in the brook, a familiar-looking wall ... But mostly it was the smells helped us find our farm, we'd reverted to dogs in the wartime night of the deserted villages. The smell of shit was the best guide of all.
    The quartermaster top kick was the guardian of the regiment's hatreds, he, until further notice, was master of the world. Anybody who talks about the future is a bastard, it's the present that counts. Invoking posterity is like making speeches to worms. There in the wartime village night the top kick was corraling human cattle for the big slaughterhouses that had just opened. The top sergeant was king. King of Death! Sergeant Cretelle!
    Absolutely! Nobody more powerful! And nobody as powerful, except one of their top sergeants on the opposite side.
    Nothing was left of the village, no living thing except terrified cats. First the furniture went, smashed up for firewood, chairs, tables, sideboards, from the lightest to the heaviest. And anything that the boys could carry, they made off with. Combs, lamps, cups, silly little things, even bridal wreaths, everything went. As if we'd had years of life ahead of us. They looted to take their minds off their troubles, to make it look as if they had years before them. Everybody likes that feeling.
    As far as they were concerned, gunfire was nothing but noise. That's why wars can keep going. Even the people who make them, who fight in them, don't really get the picture. Even with a bullet in their gut, they'd go on picking up old shoes that "might come in handy." The way a sheep, lying on its side in a meadow, will keep on grazing with its dying breath. Most people don't die until the last moment; others start twenty years in advance, sometimes more. Those are the unfortunates.
    I wasn't very bright myself, but at least I had sense enough to opt for cowardice once and for all. I imagine that's why people thought I was so uncommonly calm. Be that as it may, I inspired a paradoxical confidence in our Captain Ortolan, who decided that night to entrust me with a delicate mission. It consisted, he told me in confidence, of trotting before daylight to Noirceur-sur-la-Lys,[14] a city of weavers, situated some ten miles from the village where we'd camped. My job was to find out at firsthand whether the enemy was there or not. All that day patrols had been contradicting one another, and General des Entrayes was good and sick of it. For that reconnaissance mission I was allowed to pick one of the less purulent horses in the platoon. I hadn't gone out alone in a long time. It made me feel as if I were starting on a trip. But my feeling of deliverance was illusory. I was so tired when I set out that hard as I tried I couldn't properly visualize my own murder, I couldn't fill in the details. I moved from tree to tree, accompanied by the clanking of my hardware. All by itself my pretty saber made as much noise as a piano. I don't know if I was deserving of sympathy, but for sure I was certainly grotesque. What could General des Entrayes have been thinking, sending me out alone into that silence, all clothed in cymbals?
    The Aztecs, so the story goes, routinely disemboweled eight thousand faithful a week in their temples of the sun, a sacrifice to the god of the clouds to make him send them rain. Such things are hard to believe until you get mixed up in a war. Once you're in a war, you see how it is: the Aztecs' contempt for other people's bodies was the same as my humble viscera must have inspired in our above-mentioned General Celadon des Entrayes, who, thanks to a