Chapter VIII: Part III: I (2)

* * * * *

All sounds of life were now hushed in the village of Dialdé, and the encampment itself was silent. From afar could be heard the lion’s roar, and every now and then the most dismal sound in the world, the howling of jackals, a dirge-like accompaniment to the poor spahi’s dream....

* * * * *

From every point of view the existence of that small child was making a complete change in all his plans, rendering the difficulties of the future infinitely more complicated....

“Tjean, come into our dance!”

Jean, worn out by the day’s long expedition, was half asleep, and even as he planned for his future, he saw in a dream the Bambara dance ever slowly revolving around him. The dancers flitted past with smooth movements of the limbs, languishing attitudes, to the strains of a vague music wherein there was something unearthly.

“Tjean, come into our dance!”

Their heads, inclining towards Jean in greeting, seemed to be bent under the burden of their lofty ceremonial headdress. And now again he saw grinning faces, death-like, leaning towards him with an air of recognition, and saying very softly with phantom smiles,

“Tjean, come into our dance.”

* * * * *

Finally, little by little, Jean was completely overcome by weariness, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. But he had decided nothing....

XXII

The great day, the day of battle, had come.

At three in the morning the whole encampment of Dialdé was astir—spahis, riflemen, Bambara friendlies, were getting ready to set out on their march, with their arms and ammunition.

The Marabouts had prayed at great length; numbers of talismans had been distributed. By order of the chiefs the black warriors, according to their custom on the occasion of great battles, had loaded their carbines with powder half-way up the barrel and with bullets up to the muzzle. With such thoroughness had they carried out the order that most of the firearms burst at the first discharge, not an infrequent occurrence in negro warfare.

The orders were to make for the village of Djidiam, where, according to the report of the native scouts, Boubakar-Ségou had ensconced himself with his army behind thick palisades of timber and mud. Djidiam was the principal fortress of this personage, who had become almost legendary, the terror of the country—a sort of fabulous hero, whose strength lay in retreat, in hiding himself always in the recesses of his murderous country, and in baffling discovery.

They were to camp during the afternoon in the great woods adjoining the enemy headquarters, and finally to fall upon Djidiam by night, to set fire to the village, which would burn in the moonlight like an _auto-da-fé_ of straw. Then they were to return victorious to St Louis, before fever should have had time to decimate the expedition.

On the eve of battle Jean had written a very affectionate letter to his old parents—a poor, pencilled letter! It went down the river by the Falémé on that very day, and must have soothed the heart of his old mother, in that far country....

A little before sunrise he kissed his child, who lay asleep in the arms of Fatou-gaye. Then he mounted his horse.

XXIII

In the early morning Fatou-gaye, with her son in her arms, likewise took the road. She made her way to Nialoumbaé, a village belonging to a friendly tribe, the dwelling place of a famous Marabout, a preacher renowned for the arts of prediction and sorcery.

She asked her way to the hut of this centenarian, whom she found prostrate on his mat, muttering, like a dying man, prayers to his deity.

They had a long interview, and it resulted in the priest putting into the girl’s hands a small leather pouch, seemingly containing something very precious; and this pouch Fatou secured carefully in her waistband.

Then the Marabout administered a sleeping draught to Jean’s child, and in exchange Fatou offered the priest three large silver coins, the spahi’s last _khâliss_, which the old man put away in his purse. Then Fatou tenderly wrapped her son, already sunk into a charmed sleep, in an embroidered _pagne_, fastened the precious burden on to her back, and had herself directed to the woods, where the French were to camp that evening.

XXIV

It is seven in the morning, the scene a forlorn spot in the country of Diambour, a grass-covered marsh, surrounding a small sheet of water.

To the north a low hill bounds the horizon. Southwards as far as the eye can see stretch the great levels of Dialakar.

All is still and desolate; the sun mounts tranquilly into an azure sky.

In this African landscape, which would have fitted equally well into some solitary tract of ancient Gaul, horsemen come into view. They sit their horses proudly, handsome fellows all of them, in their red jackets, blue pantaloons, large white hats slouched over their bronzed faces. There are twelve of them, twelve spahis sent out as scouts in charge of an adjutant, and Jean is one of them.

The air holds no presage of death, no foreboding of ill-omen, nothing but the calmness and purity of the heavens. In the marshes the tall grasses, still wet with the dews of night, are sparkling in the sun; dragon flies are hovering on their long, black-flecked wings; waterlilies are opening their large white calyces.

The heat is already oppressive; the horses stretch their necks to drink, their nostrils wide, sniffing the stagnant water. The spahis halt for a moment to take counsel; they dismount in order to moisten their hats and bathe their foreheads.

Suddenly in the distance dull sounds are heard, like the noise of enormous drums all beaten simultaneously.

“It is the big tom-toms,” said Sergeant Muller, who had some experience of negro warfare.

Instinctively all the men who had dismounted made for their horses.

But a black head had just raised itself above the herbage. An old Marabout had made with his skinny arm a grotesque signal, like a magic order addressed to the reeds of the marsh. A hail of lead showered down upon the spahis.

* * * * *

The shots, steadily and carefully aimed from the shelter of the ambuscade, had all told. Five or six horses had dropped. The remainder, startled and maddened, reared and threw their wounded riders. Jean, also, had sunk to the ground with a bullet through his loins. At the same time, thirty sinister faces emerged from the grass; thirty black demons, covered with mud, bounded out, gnashing their white teeth like enraged monkeys.

O heroic combat, such as Homer might have sung, but which will remain unrecorded, unknown to fame, like so many of these far-away African frays. The poor spahis, in their fight to the death, performed prodigies of strength and valour. Fighting had on them the infuriating effect, which it produces on all such as are brave by nature. They sold their lives dearly, these men, all of whom were young, vigorous, and inured to war. In a few years they will be forgotten, even at St Louis. Who will ever mention their names, the names of those who fell in the land of Diambour, on the plains of Dialakar?

* * * * *

Meanwhile the sound of the great war-drums was drawing ever nearer.

Suddenly, while the mêlée was still proceeding, the spahis saw as in a dream, a great company of negroes passing by over the hill; warriors half naked, covered with grigris, were doubling in the direction of Dialdé in disorderly hordes. They had with them enormous war-drums, which four men together could hardly drag along. Their lean desert horses, seemingly full of fire and fury, were decked with tawdry harness, spangled with copper, their long tails and manes stained blood-red. It was a fantastic, demoniac procession, an African nightmare, swifter than the wind.

Boubakar-Ségou was passing.

He was on his way to hurl himself on the French forces.

He passed, paying no attention to the spahis, leaving them to the body of men who had lain in ambush for them, and were completing the work of exterminating them.

The spahis were being driven steadily back, away from the grass and water on to the arid sands, where a more overwhelming heat and an intenser glare would the sooner exhaust them.

No one had had time to reload. They fought with knives, sabres, nails, and teeth; there were many gaping wounds and bleeding bodies.

Two negroes had made a ferocious attack on Jean. He was stronger than they. In his fury he hurled them to earth time after time, but they always came back at him.

In the end his hands, slipping in blood, could no longer obtain a grip on the black, oily naked skins, and all the time his strength was ebbing because of his wounds.

He had a confused perception of these final impressions; his dead comrades, fallen by his side; the main body of the negro army ever hastening onwards, and now almost out of sight; handsome Muller near him, with the death rattle in his throat, and the blood pouring from his mouth; and further over, already at some distance, tall Nyaor cutting his way through towards Saldé, mowing a path with great sweeps of his sabre through a group of negroes.

* * * * *

And then three of them felled Jean to the ground, threw him on his side, holding his arms, while one of them pressed a large iron knife against his chest.

... For one terrifying moment of anguish Jean felt the pressure of this knife against his body. And there was not one human being to help him. All were dead, not a man was left.

The red cloth of his jacket, the coarse fabric of his soldier’s shirt, and his flesh formed a triple layer which offered resistance, and the knife had been badly sharpened.

The negro leaned more heavily. Jean uttered a loud, hoarse cry, and of a sudden his side was pierced. The blade, with a horrible little sound of slicing, plunged into the depths of his chest. The negro turned it in the wound, then tore it out with both hands, and kicked away the body with his foot.

* * * * *

Jean was the last to fall. The black demons raised their shout of victory and ran on without a moment’s delay, speeding like the wind in pursuit of their army.

The spahis were left alone; and the stillness of death descended upon them.

* * * * *

XXV

The main shock of the two armies took place further away, and was very bloody, although little was heard of it in France.

These minor battles, fought in a country so remote, and engaging a comparatively small number of soldiers, escape the notice of the general public; only those remember them who have lost a son or a brother.

The little French force was wavering when Boubakar-Ségou received, almost point-blank, a charge of slugs in the right temple.

The brains of the negro chief were scattered abroad. To the sound of the tabala and the iron cymbals he fell, surrounded by his priests, and entangled in his long strings of amulets. For his tribes, his fall was the signal for retreat.

The negro army resumed its march towards the impenetrable tracts of the interior, and no obstacle was opposed to its flight. The French army, indeed, was no longer in any condition to pursue them.

The red head-band of the great rebel chief was brought back to St Louis. It was all singed and riddled with shot holes. A long festoon of talismans was suspended from it, consisting of little pouches covered with various sorts of embroidery, and containing mysterious powders, cabalistic drawings, and prayers in the Maghreb tongue.

Boubakar-Ségou’s death produced a far-reaching moral effect upon the indigenous population. Inasmuch as the battle was followed by the submission of several insurgent chiefs, it might fairly be considered a victory.

The expeditionary force returned to St Louis immediately. Promotions and decorations were conferred on all the participators, but there were many gaps in the ranks of the poor spahis.

XXVI

Jean dragged himself under the scanty foliage of the tamarisks, sought a shady spot for his head, and disposed himself there to await death.

He suffered from thirst, burning thirst, and presently his throat was convulsed by slight, spasmodic movements.

He had often witnessed the death of comrades in Africa, and he recognised this distressing indication of the approaching end, which people call the death sob.

The blood was trickling from his side, and the arid sand drank it as if it were dew.

But his sufferings diminished. Indeed, apart from this burning thirst, he was now in little pain.

Strange visions passed before poor Jean’s eyes: the mountain range of the Cevennes, the well-known haunts of his childhood, his cottage in the mountains.

Above all he saw visions of leafy landscapes, full of shade, mosses, coolness, and running water; his dear old mother, who took him gently by the hand to lead him as she had done in his childhood.

He felt his mother’s kiss! O, his mother, there she was, smoothing his brow with her poor old trembling hands, bathing his burning head with cool water. Could it be? Never more to feel a mother’s kiss, never more to hear her voice? Never, never more? Was this the end of everything? To die there alone, all alone, in the burning sun of the desert! And he half-raised himself, unwilling to die.

* * * * *

“Tjean, come into our dance!”

In front of him, like a whirlwind, like a furious gale, swept the circle of phantom dancers. The fierce gyrations of this vortex seemed to strike sparks from the burning pebbles.

And these spectral dancers, rising in swift spirals, like smoke before a rushing wind, faded away on high, in the fiery crucible of the blue ether.

Jean had the sensation of rising with them, of being borne aloft on terrible wings, and it came to him that this was the climax, the very moment of death.

But it was merely a convulsion of the muscles, a horrible pang of pain.

The red blood gushed from his mouth, and again a voice, whispering at his ear, said,

“Tjean, come into our dance.”

He grew calmer; his sufferings abated, and once more he sank down on his bed of sand.

* * * * *

Thronging memories of childhood came to life again in his mind, with singular clearness. He heard an old folksong, wherewith his mother used to lull him to sleep when he was a baby in his cradle; then suddenly, in the midst of the desert, the village chime rang out the evening Angelus.

Tears coursed down his bronzed cheeks. The prayers of long ago returned to his memory, and the poor soldier set himself to praying with the fervour of a child. He took between his hands the medal of the Virgin, which his mother had hung round his neck. He still had sufficient strength to raise it to his lips, and he kissed it with immeasurable love. He prayed with all his soul to Our Lady of Sorrows, to whom his simple-minded mother was wont to pray on his behalf each evening. He was steeped in the splendour of those radiant hallucinations that surround a deathbed; and aloud, in the overwhelming silence of these solitudes, he repeated, in a fast-failing voice, the inevitable adieu, “Farewell, farewell, until we meet in heaven.”

It was close on noon. Jean’s sufferings were diminishing. The desert in the intense tropical light seemed to him like a great brasier of white fire which no longer had power to burn him. And yet his bosom heaved as if to breathe more deeply; his mouth opened as if to plead for water.

* * * * *

At last his lower jaw dropped; his mouth fell open for the last time, and Jean passed peacefully away in the dazzling sunshine.

* * * * *

XXVII

When Fatou-gaye returned from the village of the great Marabout, bringing with her a mysterious article in a leather wallet, the women of the friendly tribe informed her that the battle was over.

Anxious, panting, exhausted, she made her way back to camp, hastening with feverish step over the hot sand, and carrying on her back her still-sleeping baby, wrapped in a piece of blue cloth.

The first person she met was the Mussulman, Nyaor-fall, the black spahi, who, as she approached, looked at her gravely, telling the beads of his long Maghreb rosary.

In the language of the country, she jerked out the words,

“Where is he?”

With a restrained gesture, Nyaor stretched his arm towards the south of Diambour, the open plains of Dialakar.

“Yonder!” ... said he. “He has gained Paradise.” ...

XXVIII

All day long Fatou-gaye traversed with feverish step thickets and sand, still carrying her sleeping baby on her back. She went to and fro, sometimes breaking into a run, with the distracted movements of a pantheress that has lost her young. Ever she pursued her search under the burning sun, exploring the thickets, groping in the thorny brushwood.

* * * * *

About three in the afternoon, as she was crossing an arid plain, she caught sight of a dead horse, then of a red jacket, then another, and yet another.... It was the scene of the defeat. It was there that the spahis had fallen....

Here and there a sparse growth of mimosas and tamarisks cast upon the yellow soil slender shadows, sun-chequered....

In the remote distance, at the end of this vast plain, the skyline of a village of pointed huts could be seen against the deep blue of the horizon.

Fatou-gaye had halted, trembling and terrified.... She had recognised him, Jean, yonder, stretched out in the sun, with stiffened arms and open mouth. She muttered some obscure, heathen invocation and touched the grigris round her ebony neck.

With haggard, bloodshot eyes, she stood there a long time, muttering softly to herself....

From afar she caught sight of some old women of the enemy tribe, who were making for the corpses, and a horrible surmise flashed upon her....

These hideous old negresses, their skins glistening under the tropic sun, diffused an acrid odour of soumaré. With a jingling of grigris and beads they approached the young soldiers. They stirred them with their feet; as they desecrated them with obscene touch they laughed and uttered mocking ejaculations, resembling the gibbering of monkeys. They profaned these corpses with gruesome buffoonery....

And then they stripped them of their gilt buttons, which they stuck in their frizzled hair; they took from them their steel spurs, their red jackets, their belts....

Fatou-gaye was crouching behind her clump of brushwood, holding herself back, like a cat about to spring. When it came to Jean’s turn, she leaped out, her nails in readiness, uttering cries like a wild beast, and reviling the negro women in a strange tongue....

And the baby, who had woken up, clung to the back of his raging, terrifying mother....

The negro women were afraid and drew back....

Besides, their arms were full enough of booty, and they thought they could come back again on the morrow. They exchanged some words, which Fatou could not understand, and took their departure, turning round, however, to insult her with savage laughter and the mocking gestures of chimpanzees.

* * * * *

When Fatou-gaye was alone, she crouched close to Jean and called him by his name. Three times she cried, “Tjean! Tjean! Tjean!” in shrill tones, which echoed in these solitudes like the voice of a priestess of old who invokes the dead....

There she lay, crouching under the implacable African sun, with unseeing gaze fixed on the distance on the parched and desolate landscape. She was afraid to turn her eyes on Jean’s face.

The vultures swooped down insolently towards her, beating the heavy air with their great dark pinions....

They hovered near the corpses, not yet daring ... it was too soon.

* * * * *

Fatou-gaye caught sight of the medal of the Virgin in the spahi’s hand, and understood that he had been praying when death came to him. She, too, had medals of the Virgin and a scapulary among the grigris round her neck. She had been baptised by Catholic priests at St Louis, but it was not in them that she put her trust.

She took a leather amulet, which formerly in the land of Galam a negro woman, her mother had given her. This was the fetish she loved, and she kissed it with ardour.

Then she bent over Jean’s body and raised his head.

Blue flies kept coming out from his open mouth, between his white teeth, and from the wounds in his thorax trickled a fluid already fetid.

* * * * *

XXIX

Then she seized her baby with the intention of strangling him.

Dreading to hear his cries, she first filled his mouth with sand.

Nor could she bear to see his little face in the paroxysms of suffocation. Frenziedly she dug a hole in the ground, buried his head in it, and heaped more sand upon it.

Then she gripped his neck with her two hands and squeezed it—squeezed it hard, until his active little limbs, which were stiffening under the influence of pain, were relaxed in death.

When the child was dead, she laid him on his father’s bosom.

So died the son of Jean Peyral.... A mystery! What god had thrust him into life, the spahi’s child? What had he come to seek on this earth, and whither did he return?

Then Fatou-gaye wept tears of blood—her piercing lamentations echoed over the plains of Dialakar. And last of all, she took the Marabout’s leather wallet and swallowed a bitter paste contained therein. Her death throes began, a lingering and cruel agony. For a long time she lay in the sunlight shaken by death rattle and death sob; she tore her throat with her nails, and plucked out handfuls of hair mingled with amber.

Round her were the vultures, awaiting her last moment.

* * * * *

XXX

When the yellow sun set over the plains of Diambour, her struggles were over; her death agony at an end.

She lay, stretched out upon Jean’s body, clasping with rigid arms her dead son. Hot and starry, the first night of their death descended upon them—bringing with it the saturnalia of wild life, with its hushed mysterious beginning, in every corner of this sombre continent of Africa.

* * * * *

That same evening, in that far country at the foot of the Cevennes, Jeanne’s wedding procession was passing in front of the cottage of the old Peyrals.

XXXI

APOTHEOSIS

At first it is heard as a distant moaning, rising from the furthest limits of the desert; then the gruesome chorus approaches through the luminous obscurity: the doleful howling of jackals, the piercing wails of hyenas and tiger-cats.

* * * * *

Poor mother, poor old woman!... This human form, vaguely discernible in the darkness, lying in the midst of these solitudes, its mouth gaping under a sky all strewn with stars, sleeping there at a time when the wild beasts awake—this form which will never rise again—poor mother, poor old woman!... this corpse that lies forsaken is your son!...

“Jean, come into our dance.”

The ravenous pack glides softly through the night, stealing through the thickets, creeping among the lofty grasses. By the light of the stars they fall upon the corpses of the young soldiers, and begin the repast, which has been ordained by blind nature. All that is alive draws its nourishment, in one form or another, from that which has died.

* * * * *

The man ever grasps in his dead hand the medal of the Virgin, the woman her leather grigris. Watch well over them, O precious amulets.

* * * * *

To-morrow, great, bald-headed vultures will carry on the work of destruction—the bones of the dead will be strewn upon the sand, scattered hither and thither by the beasts of the desert—their skulls will bleach in the sun, to be the sport of winds and grasshoppers.

* * * * *

Aged parents by the chimney corner, aged parents in your cottage; father, bowed under the weight of years, you who dream of your son, the handsome young soldier in his red jacket—aged mother! you who pray each evening for the absent one—aged parents, long will you await your son, long await the spahi!