When Maxime left he was really glad to go back to the front. The gulf that he had found between the front and rear seemed to him deeper than the trenches, and guns did not appear to him as murderous as ideas.
As the railway carriage drew out of the station he leaned from the window and followed with his eyes the tearful faces of his family fading in the distance, and he thought:
“Poor dears, you are their victims and we are yours.”
The day after his return to the front the great spring offensive was let loose, which the talkative newspapers had announced to the enemy several weeks beforehand. The hopes of the nation had been fed on it during the gloomy winter of waiting and death, and it rose now, filled with an impatient joy, sure of victory and crying out to it—“At last!”
The first news seemed good; of course it spoke only of the enemy’s losses, and all faces brightened. Parents whose sons, women whose husbands were “out there” were proud that their flesh and their love had a part in this sanguinary feast; and in their exaltation they hardly stopped to think that their dear one might be among the victims. The excitement ran so high that Clerambault, an affectionate, tender father, generally most anxious for those he loved, was actually afraid that his son had not got back in time for “The Dance.” He wanted him to be there, his eager wishes pushed, thrust him into the abyss, making this sacrifice, disposing of his son and of his life, without asking if he himself agreed. He and his had ceased to belong to themselves. He could not conceive that it should be otherwise with any of them. The obscure will of the ant-heap had eaten him up.
Sometimes taken unawares, the remains of his self-analytical habit of mind would appear; like a sensitive nerve that is touched—a dull blow, a quiver of pain, it is gone, and we forget it.
At the end of three weeks the exhausted offensive was still pawing the ground of the same blood-soaked kilometres, and the newspapers began to distract public attention, putting it on a fresh scent. Nothing had been heard from Maxime since he left. They sought for the ordinary reasons for delay which the mind furnishes readily but the heart cannot accept. Another week went by. Among themselves each of the three pretended to be confident, but at night, each one alone in his room, the heart cried out in agony, and the whole day long the ear was strained to catch every step on the stair, the nerves stretched to the breaking point at a ring of the bell, or the touch of a hand passing the door.
The first official news of the losses began to come in; several families among Clerambault’s friends already knew which of their men were dead and which wounded. Those who had lost all, envied those who could have their loved ones back, though bleeding, perhaps mutilated. Many sank into the night of their grief; for them the war and life were equally over. But with others the exaltation of the early days persisted strangely; Clerambault saw one mother wrought up by her patriotism and her grief to the point that she almost rejoiced at the death of her son. “I have given my all, my all!” she would say, with a violent, concentrated joy such as is felt in the last second before extinction by a woman who drowns herself with the man she loves. Clerambault however was weaker, and waking from his dizziness he thought:
“I too have given all, even what was not my own.”
He inquired of the military authorities, but they knew nothing as yet. Ten days later came the news that Sergeant Clerambault was reported as missing from the night of the 27–28th of the preceding month. Clerambault could get no further details at the Paris bureaus; therefore he set out for Geneva, went to the Red Cross, the Agency for Prisoners—could find nothing; followed up every clue, got permission to question comrades of his son in hospitals or depots behind the lines. They all gave contradictory information; one said he was a prisoner, another had seen him dead, and both the next day admitted that they had been mistaken. … Oh! tortures! God of vengeance! … He came back after a fortnight from this Way of the Cross, aged, broken-down, exhausted.
He found his wife in a paroxysm of frantic grief, which in this good-natured creature had turned to a furious hatred of the enemy; she cried out for revenge, and for the first time Clerambault did not answer. He had not strength enough to hate, he could only suffer.
He shut himself into his room. During that frightful ten days’ pilgrimage he had scarcely looked his thoughts in the face, hypnotised as he was, day and night by one idea, like a dog on a scent—faster! go faster! The slowness of carriages and trains consumed him, and once, when he had taken a room for the night, he rushed away the same evening, without stopping to rest. This fever of haste and expectation devoured everything, and made consecutive thought impossible—which was his salvation. Now that the chase was ended, his mind, exhausted and dying, recovered its powers.
Clerambault knew certainly that Maxime was dead.
