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Updated: May 1, 2025
But I did not say anything. I bow my head and walk more heavily. I see Madame Marcassin coming out of the church with blinking eyes, weary-looking, a widow indeed. I bow and approach her and talk to her a little, humbly, about her husband, since I was under his orders and saw him die. She listens to me in dejected inattention. She is elsewhere.
And the greatness of this silence, this despotic and oppressive motion, irritated Adjutant Marcassin, who would have liked to see some animation. He rated and lashed us with a vengeance. He hustled the file in the narrowness of the trench as he clove to the corners so as to survey his charge. But then he had no knapsack.
This word she imagined must signify something particularly wonderful, since her eyes were compared to it; and being desirous, some time afterwards, to know all the energy of the expression, she asked the meaning of the French word marcassin. As there are no wild boars in England, those to whom she addressed herself, told her that it signified a young pig.
When we went to bed we were tired with standing still, or with walking too slowly. We should have liked to go to the front. Marcassin, housed in the company office, was never far away, and kept an eye on us in silence. One day I was sharply rebuked by him for having turned the water on in the lavatory at a time other than placarded. Detected, I had to stand before him at attention.
She says to me at last, "I had a memorial service since it's usual." Then she maintains a silence which means "There's nothing to be said, just as there's nothing to be done." In face of that emptiness I understand the crime that Marcassin committed in letting himself be killed for nothing but the glory of dying. We have gone out together and aimlessly; we walk straight forward.
You're not dead yet, eh!" Crillon called to us. Marie was looking at me and could not speak. "In step! One-two!" cried Adjutant Marcassin, striding along the detachment. We crossed our quarter as the day declined over it.
Towards the end of the afternoon the piercing whistle of the bullets was redoubled. We were riddled and battered by the noise. The wariness with which we watched the landscape that was watching us seemed to exasperate Marcassin. He pondered an idea; then came to a sudden decision and cried triumphantly, "Look!"
In my street there are twelve houses where the people no longer await anything and have nothing to say, like Madame Marcassin. In some others, the one who has disappeared will perhaps come back; and they go about in them in a sort of hope which leans only on emptiness and silence. There are women who have begun their lives again in a kind of happy misery.
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