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

to come and massacre us. And they could have done it with one hand, just steady a rifle against a tree and wait for us. I kept thinking that the first light we'd see would be the flash of the shot that would end it all.
    In the four weeks the war had been going on, we'd grown so tired, so miserable, that tiredness had taken away some of my fear. In the end the torture of being harassed night and day by those monsters, the noncoms, especially the low-ranking ones, who were even stupider, pettier, and more hateful than usual, made even the most obstinate among us doubt the advisability of going on living.
    Oh, how you long to get away! To sleep! That's the main thing! When it becomes really impossible to get away and sleep, then the will to live evaporates of its own accord. Seeing we were still alive, we'd just have to look as if we were looking for our regiment. Before a thought can start up in the brain of a jughead, a lot of cruel things must happen to him. The man who had made me think for the first time in my life, really think, practical thoughts that were really my own, was undoubtedly Major Pinçon, that torture master. I therefore thought of him as hard as I could as I clanked along, crushed by the weight of my armor, an extra in this incredible international extravaganza, into which, I have to admit, I had leapt with enthusiasm.
    Every yard of darkness ahead of us was a promise of death and destruction. But how would it come? The only element of uncertainty was the uniform of the killer. Would he be one of us? Or of them?
    I hadn't done anything to Pinçon! No more than I had to the Germans ... With his face like a rotten peach, his four bands that glittered all over him from his head to his belly button, his scraggly mustache and his bony knees, with the field glasses dangling from his neck like a cowbell and his 1/1000 map. I kept wondering why he was so intent on sending other people to their death. Other people who had no maps,
    We four horsemen on the road were making as much noise as a battalion. They must have heard us coming ten miles away, or else they didn't want to hear us. That was always a possibility. Maybe the Germans were afraid of us? Why not?
    A month of sleepiness on every eyelid, that's what we were carrying, and as much again in the backs of our heads, plus all those pounds of tin.
    The men in my party didn't express themselves very well. Actually they hardly spoke at all. They'd come from the ends of Brittany, and what they knew they hadn't learned at school but in the army. That night I tried to make a little conversation about the village of Barbigny with the one next to me ... his name was Kersuzon.
    "Kersuzon," I say. "We're in the Ardennes now ... Do you see anything in the distance? I don't see a damn thing ..."
    "It's as black as an asshole," Kersuzon says. That was enough ...
    "But," I suggest, "haven't you heard anyone mention Barbigny in the course of the day?
    Give you an idea where it is?"
    "No."
    That was that.
    We never did find Barbigny. We went around in circles until morning and ended up in another village, where the man with the field glasses was waiting for us. The general was taking his black coffee in the arbor outside the mayor's house when we got there.
    "Ah, Pinçon!" he says in a loud voice to his chief of staff as he sees us pass, "Youth is so wonderful!" After that he went out for a leak and then, stooped over, his hands behind his back, he took a little stroll. The general was very tired that morning, the orderly confided to me, he'd slept badly, some trouble with his bladder, so it seemed.
    Kersuzon always gave me the same answer when I questioned him at night, as if I'd pressed a button, it kind of tickled me. Two or three times more he said the same thing about the asshole darkness and a while after that he was killed, on his way out of some village we'd mistaken for some other village by some French soldiers who'd mistaken us for somebody else.
    It was a few days,