Where I Left My Soul

  WHERE I LEFT MY SOUL

  WHERE I LEFT MY SOUL

  Translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan

  JÉRÔME FERRARI

  An imprint of Quercus

  New York • London

  © 2010 by Jérôme Ferrari

  First published in the French language as Où j’ai laissé mon âme

  by Actes Sud, Arles, 2010

  Author’s preface © Jérôme Ferrari

  English translation Copyright © 2012 by Geoffrey Strachan

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  e-ISBN 978-1-62365-508-2

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  for Jean-Yves Templon

  CONTENTS

  Translator’s Note

  Author’s Preface

  27 March, 1957: First Day

  28 March, 1957: Second Day

  29 March, 1957: Third Day

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  A number of people and organizations referred to in the original French text of Jérôme Ferrari’s novel relate to the period of rebellion and war in French Algeria between 1954 and 1962 which led to Algerian independence. The F.L.N. (Front de Libération Nationale) was the independence movement and the A.L.N. (Armée de Libération Nationale) was its military wing. The revolutionary committee divided the country into six autonomous zones or Wilayas. Kabylia is the region of Algeria on whose coastline Algiers is situated: it has a distinct landscape and culture, the Kabylian Berber people have lived there over many centuries. The French settlers in Algeria (who left for metropolitan France after independence) were known as pieds noirs. The harkis were Algerian Muslims fighting on the French side. Général Raoul Salan was Commander-in-Chief of the French army in Algeria from 1956 until he retired in 1960. An opponent of Algerian independence, Salan was one of the generals who led an attempted coup against the French government in 1961 and launched the O.A.S. (Organisation Armée Secrète), using underground techniques of terrorism. Général Jacques de Bollardière, who had fought at El Alamein and in the maquis, and who was sent to Algeria in 1956, was shocked by the attitudes of the French army and requested posting back to France. In March 1957, a letter from him was published in L’Express voicing his criticisms and he was sentenced to sixty days of “fortress arrest” for this breach of discipline.

  The military ranks of caporal, sergent, adjudant-chef, sous-lieutenant, lieutenant, capitaine, commandant, lieutenant-colonel, colonel and général, which I have left in French in the text, are approximately equivalent to the British military ranks of corporal, sergeant, warrant officer, second lieutenant, lieutenant, captain, major, lieutenant colonel, colonel and general.

  I am indebted to a number of people, including the author, for assistance and advice in the preparation of this translation. My thanks are due, in particular, to June Elks, Ben Faccini, Scott Grant, Don Hill, Russell Ingham, Pierre Sciama, Simon Strachan and Susan Strachan, as well as Christopher MacLehose, who commissioned it.

  G.S.

  AUTHOR’S PREFACE

  Many of them began their careers by fighting against the Nazis in 1943 or 1944, in the service of a cause about which it was impossible to have doubts. At the end of the war they remained in the Army. They were not to know that they would have almost twenty more years of fighting to do, throughout the slow and bloody death agony of the French colonial Empire. They were young officers, carried along by the wind of history, but, without their being aware of it, the wind changed and began to blow against them.

  Following the victory of 1945 all they experienced was an uninterrupted series of defeats; in November 1954, some months after the disaster of Dien Bien Phu, when the Viet Minh had only just released those of them who survived the re-education camps, another war was beginning, which ended eight years later – in spite of electric-shock torture, waterboarding and summary executions – with Algerian independence.

  The Algerian War opened a grievous wound in French history which has palpably not healed to this day. But it was not French wounds, nor even history, that interested me; I was only interested in the trajectory these officers followed, as a paradigm of the way in which man, as he plunges into his own inner darkness, loses his soul. I wanted to capture all that is tragic, incomprehensible and appallingly banal about this trajectory. To capture the moment when we open our eyes in horror at the mirror reflecting back at us the very image of everything we have sought to fight against.

  And I fear that what Algeria has given to humanity is only one opportunity, among many others, for it to open its eyes in horror at itself.

  J. F.

  “He is saying that there is no peace for him by moonlight and that his duty is a hard one. He says it always, whether he is asleep or awake, and he always sees the same thing: a path of moonlight. He longs to walk along it and talk to his prisoner, Ha-Notsri, because he claims he had more to say to him on that distant fourteenth day of Nisan. But he never succeeds in reaching that path and no-one ever comes near him.”

  Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

  Translated by Michael Glenny

  I remember you, mon capitaine, I remember you clearly, and I can still picture distinctly the dark confusion and despair that filled your eyes when I told you he had hanged himself. It was a cold spring morning, mon capitaine, it was so long ago and yet for a brief moment, there in front of me I caught a glimpse of the old man you have finally become. You asked me how we could possibly have left such an important prisoner as Tahar unguarded, several times you repeated, how could you possibly? as if it were essential for you to grasp the inconceivable negligence we had been guilty of – but what answer could I give? So I remained silent, I smiled at you and at length you understood and I saw the night fall upon you, you crumpled behind your desk, all the years you had left to live coursed through your veins, they streamed from your heart and submerged you and suddenly in front of me there was an old man on the brink of death, or perhaps a little child, an orphan, abandoned beside a long desert road. You levelled your eyes filled with darkness upon me and I felt the chill breath of your impotent hatred, mon capitaine, you made no reproach, your lips tightened to hold in check the caustic torrent of words you had no right to utter and your body trembled because none of the surges of outrage that shook it could be allowed to run its course, naivety and hope are no excuse, mon capitaine, and you knew very well that you could no more be absolved of his death than I could. You lowered your eyes, I clearly remember, and muttered, you took him from me, Andreani, you took him from me, in a broken voice, and I was a
shamed for you, no longer strong enough to conceal the obscenity of your distress. When you had got a grip on yourself you made a gesture without looking at me, the gesture that is used to dismiss servants and dogs, and you lost patience because I took the time to salute you, you said, just fuck off, lieutenant! but I completed my salute and punctiliously performed a regulation right turn before leaving because some things are more important than your qualms. I was glad to get out into the street, I must admit, mon capitaine, and to escape from the repellent spectacle of your agonizing and all your hopeless wrestling with yourself. I inhaled a breath of fresh air and thought perhaps I should recommend the general staff to relieve you of your duties, that I had an obligation to do so, but I quickly abandoned this idea, mon capitaine, for loyalty is the only virtue. And yet I had been so happy to meet up with you again, you know, and I still hope that you, too, at least for a while, had been happy to do so. We had lived through so many difficult times together. But no-one knows what secret law governs our souls and it quickly became clear that you had grown apart from me and we could no longer understand one another. When I agreed to take command of that special section and installed myself with my men in the villa at Saint-Eugène you became openly hostile, I remember it clearly. I could not understand it and was hurt by it, I can tell you now, our missions were not so different that you were entitled to heap your hatred and scorn upon me, we were soldiers, mon capitaine, and it was not for us to choose how to fight, I, too, should have preferred to do it differently, you know, I too, should have preferred the bloody turmoil of battle to the appalling monotony of this hunt for intelligence, but we were not given any choice. Still today I ask myself by what aberration you could have convinced yourself that your actions were better than mine. You, too, sought and obtained intelligence and there was only ever one method for obtaining this, mon capitaine, you know very well, only one, and the hideous simplicity of this method could not in any way be compensated for by your scruples, your ludicrous posturings, your sanctimoniousness and remorse, which achieved nothing, except to make a laughing stock of you and all of us along with you. When I was ordered to come and take charge of Tahar at your command post at El-Biar, I cherished a moment of hope that your delight at having captured one of the leaders of the A.L.N. might perhaps have made you more friendly, but you did not speak to me, you had Tahar taken from his cell and gave him the full military compliments, he was led to me past a file of French soldiers who presented arms to him, him, that terrorist, that son of a whore, on your orders, while I had to submit to this shame without saying a word. Oh, mon capitaine, what was the point of such a masquerade, and what were you hoping for? Was it the gratitude of this man with whom you had become infatuated to the extent of breaking down at the news of his death? But he never spoke of you, you know, not a word; he never said, Capitaine Degorce is an admirable man, or anything of the kind and I am certain that at no time, at no time, do you understand, mon capitaine, did you occupy the smallest place in his thoughts. Tahar was a hard man who was not given to your type of sentimentality, I regret having to tell you this, and, unlike you, he knew very well that he was going to die, he had no expectation of some happy outcome along the lines of those you must surely have been dreaming of in your puerile overexcitement and blindness, puerile and inexcusable, mon capitaine, you could not be unaware of what the villa at Saint-Eugène was, you could not be unaware that no-one left it alive, for it was not a villa, it was a door open onto the abyss, a gash in the canvas of the world through which people toppled into nothingness – I have seen so many men die, mon capitaine, and they all knew they would never be seen again, no-one would kiss them on the brow while reciting the Shahadah, no loving hand would piously wash their bodies or bless them before consigning them to the earth, all they had was me, and at that moment I was closer to them than their own mothers, yes, I was their mother and their guide and I escorted them into the limbo of oblivion, to the shores of a nameless river, to a silence so complete that prayers and promises of salvation could not disturb it. In one sense Tahar was lucky that you had shown him to the press, we had to hand over his body, but if it had been up to me, mon capitaine, I should have dissolved him in quicklime too, I should have buried him in the depths of the bay, I should have scattered him to the desert winds, I should have erased him from people’s memories. I should have caused him never to have existed. Tahar knew it, he knew what it is to have an enemy. But you never grasped any of this, mon capitaine, we do justice to our enemy not with our compassion or our respect, for which he has no use, but with our hatred, our cruelty – and our joy. You may perhaps remember that little student from a seminary, a conscript some stupid pen-pusher who knew nothing about our mission had assigned to me as assistant, a religious zealot, like you, afflicted with a sensitive soul, but a genuinely sensitive one, very much more innocent and honest than yours. When he arrived he was relieved because he thought he would not have to dirty his hands and he was, in a manner of speaking, safe from sin. He reported to me and I almost dismissed him. He gazed out of the windows of the villa at the sea and the laurels in the garden and could not help smiling, I think he had never seen so much light and space, he felt more alive than he had ever been, liberated from damp dawns on his knees on the chilly stone floor of some murky chapel, liberated from shameful whisperings in the dim light of a musty confessional, and I kept him on, after all it was not my place to make decisions about which lesson each of us was to take, whatever the cost, nor who was to be excused, mon capitaine, for when it comes down to it every one of us has had to pay attention, right to the end, to the same timeless and brutal lesson and nobody asked us whether we were willing to hear it, so I told the little seminarist that he would have to take notes when suspects were being interrogated, I dictated a few sentences to him, his handwriting was neat, energetic and elegant and I let him find a billet. He came back to see me, he was shattered, he said to me, please sir, it’s impossible, the walls in the barrack room are covered in pornographic photographs and he asked me to have them taken down, he was stammering, I told him I did not deal with matters of this kind and that he must simply look away, and he left the room, but later I found him sitting on the edge of his bed beside his open kitbag, staring at the photographs, his mouth agape, his hands clasping an appalling black wooden crucifix and he looked so vulnerable, mon capitaine, almost as much as you did when I told you Tahar had hanged himself, but in his case, I could understand it, all he had known was the looming shade of the Virgin, swathed in her long blue mantle, the pure tears of Mary Magdalene and the celestial ecstasies of Saint Teresa of Avila, and now he could not take his eyes off these women spreading their legs before him with their brutish tufts, their glistening genitalia, open, as if cut with knives, and he felt the fires of hell consuming the marrow of his bones, as he clutched the body of Our Lord, but nothing could make him look away. The next day, I made him witness his first interrogation, he sat in a corner of the room, his notebook on his knees, he said nothing when we suspended the Arab from the ceiling, as if, since his arrival, he could do nothing but open his eyes wide, simmer and remain silent, and I was grateful to him, mon capitaine, for having understood so quickly that there was nothing to be said. I applied the electrodes to the ear and penis. He watched the naked body rear and tense and the huge mouth, distorted with shouting, he watched the water flowing and soaking the rag fastened to the face of the Arab whose flayed heels struck the ground staining the wet cement with blood. When we removed the damp rag and the Arab, after panting like an animal, said he would talk, my little seminarist was still staring and I had to remind him that he must take notes now. Every day he endured the deadly tedium of that ceremony over which you and I, mon capitaine, so often presided, the repetition of the same unchanging routines that assembled us around the ugliness of naked bodies and, for as long as he remained with me, he carried out his duties without ever complaining. He found a place on the wall for his crucifix, in amongst the photographs, he followed the men into
Si Messaoud’s brothel in the High Casbah and accepted being completely changed for ever, accepted becoming the man he had become in spite of himself, unresisting, without boasting, but this was something you never accepted, mon capitaine, you never rose to the challenge of your destiny, all you could ever do was to make desperate efforts to hurl far away from yourself the being you were in the process of becoming and, of course, you did become it all the same. Everything that lies beyond the delicate ebb and flow of your own soul is a matter of indifference to you, and you only care about what might sully the graven image you have erected to yourself, and at which you worship. So there you are, Capitaine André Degorce, resistance fighter, deported at the age of nineteen, survivor of the battle of Dien Bien Phu and the camps of the Viet Minh. History awarded you an official victim’s diploma once and for all and you have hung on to it desperately, unable to do anything other than wear yourself out vainly seeking to formulate subtle distinctions, utterly meaningless, of course, as to what is clean and what is dirty, what is worthy of you and what is not, with what degree of delicacy one should treat one’s enemies, and you must have regretted that no manual of etiquette exists which might have calmed your debutante’s anxieties. But you are incapable of love and compassion, apart from the theoretical compassion of parish priests, that abstract love for a fellow human being who does not exist. When the killers sent by Tahar wiped out Si Messaoud’s brothel, mon capitaine, I went to the site with my section, remember, you and I ran into one another there, and I had all the men in the nearby houses who claimed to have heard nothing arrested. Si Messaoud’s head had been placed on a stone bench in the entrance hall. We found the girls piled up in the patio, their guts strewn over the marble paving stones. The seminarist did not vomit. He wept, mon capitaine, he wept for a long time over the girls’ bodies, recalling the warmth and comfort, recalling the kisses, he wept and could not stop, but the following night, when the neighbours were being interrogated, he was no longer weeping, he hit them in the small of the back with a length of hosepipe one after the other, he turned the handle of the generator and, even if we obtained nothing that night, it was only thus, much more than with his tears, that he showed the reality of his compassion. That is what compassion can do, but it is, of course, something you are absolutely incapable of understanding, disembowelled prostitutes don’t deserve the favour of your notice, they don’t merit the pain inflicted on those men who blocked their ears and let them die, nor that on those who massacred them, starting with Tahar, whose bogus moralistic posturing you admired to the extent of according him the full military compliments, before my eyes, mon capitaine, before my very eyes, without a thought for the terror of the whores, without a thought for the young people at the Milk Bar, blown to pieces by the bomb Tahar sent them to pay them back for being young and happy-go-lucky, without a thought for anything other than yourself and your amazing warrior’s nobility. The young people who died at the Milk Bar are long forgotten, but you have not even had to forget them, mon capitaine, you quite simply never gave them a thought. Maybe you are right, what point is there in thinking about what is bound to be forgotten? They were listening to music and drinking lemonade, and a young woman came in, a fair-skinned girl from Kabylia who set down the bag containing the bomb beside the counter, no-one turned to look at her as she left, the boys were too busy watching the girls’ breasts stirring beneath the light fabric of their summer dresses, they were making utterly silly remarks, which were silenced by the explosion, they were not worth much, mon capitaine, they were very sure of themselves, bursting with arrogance and scorn, but they were our own, just as the whores were, their worth is immaterial, it was simply incumbent on us to bear witness that they had lived. It was our duty to bear witness, with the water, the electricity, the knife, with all the force of our compassion. Everything gets forgotten so quickly, mon capitaine, everything is so weightless. I went back there, you know, a few years ago, in an almost empty aircraft. No-one remembers us. At the airport the policeman stamped my passport and wished me a pleasant stay. Maybe he took me for a pied-noir suffering from nostalgia who wanted to revisit his childhood home before he died. But probably he didn’t even ask himself any questions. The city resembles a decrepit old lady pickled in her own filth, falling apart beneath the tawdry rags of her former glory. In front of the Milk Bar the Emir Abd el-Kader holds aloft the sword of victory and the streets are named after the terrorists we killed. But don’t be deceived, mon capitaine, they, too, have been forgotten, their sanctification has made them disappear for ever, more surely than silence could have done. I went and took a room at the Hôtel Saint-George, there were damp patches on the walls and ceramic tiles missing, but the air in the garden was scented with jasmine just as it was forty years ago when I used to leave the villa to drink a whisky in the winter sunlight. I took a taxi and the driver asked me what I was doing there, in the end I told him a lie, I said I was feeling homesick and before I died I wanted to see the house I had lived in as a child. He offered to take me there and I said I would wait and see. He grumbled about the water being cut off and about his job which meant he had to drive around at night and run the risk of meeting a dummy road block, this had happened to him once, he had even burned his tongue swallowing his lighted cigarette, you see, mon capitaine, the Islamists don’t like smokers, that’s something they have in common with your old friends in the F.L.N., their disgusting moralism, and the taxi driver laughed at how he had got away with it. I asked him to put me down at the Place des Martyrs and to wait for me there a moment. I walked past the mosque of the Jews and went up into the Casbah. Children were playing amid the refuse and rubble, a man was listening to music in a dark room and swaying backwards and forwards, his face in his hands, and I felt as if I could have walked about in this labyrinth without getting lost, just like in those days so long ago, when we used to leap from rooftop to rooftop, mon capitaine, and Tahar’s men used to go to ground like rats in that maze of wells and dark arcades as they learned to fear us. But I retraced my footsteps and told the driver to do a tour of the city before taking me back to the hotel. We drove along beside the sea, to Saint-Eugène, I saw the villa, nowadays it must belong to a high-ranking officer and I’m sure the ghosts I left there do not trouble his sleep. I did my work well. We drove up towards El-Biar, past a building from which the music for a wedding was spilling out, and the taxi driver joined in the song, a very old song which Belkacem, the harki in my section, often used to sing, I remember it clearly, oh, if my soul were in my hands, a very well known song, you must have heard it yourself, mon capitaine, I love you, Sara, let me live in your heart, you are my life, Sara. The taxi driver was singing at the top of his voice, I could die for you, Sara, and he seemed happy for me to hum along with him. Don’t leave me, Sara. You’ve left your mark in my heart, it will never depart. At the hotel I gave him a thousand dinars and told him that, on reflection, I was not all that keen to see my childhood home again. He insisted on my taking his telephone number in case I needed it. He shook my hand. Everything is so weightless, mon capitaine, everything is so swiftly forgotten. The blood of our people and the blood we shed has all been washed away long ago by fresh blood, and that, too, will soon be washed away in turn. I read the newspapers amid the cool of the jasmine. Seventeen customs officers killed at Timimoun. Three policemen decapitated at Sétif. Between Béchar and Taghit a whole wedding procession had their throats cut in a dummy roadblock. Everything is so weightless. The bride may have been called Samia, or Rym, or Nardjess. Who remembers? Our actions lack gravity, mon capitaine, but you are too proud to accept this. Can you not see? Our actions carry no weight, they count for nothing, a race of men may once have existed who knew this, perhaps the ones who slit the wedding couple’s throats still know this, but as for us, we have grown sensitive, we are no longer capable of purging ourselves of our past deeds, purely and simply, as if they were shit, and we poison ourselves, our past deeds poison us, we suffocate from denial or from self-justification and here I
am in one way just like you, mon capitaine, even if this fact gives me no joy, if I had not been like you, if I had not attached exaggerated importance to my past deeds, I should not have joined the O.A.S., I should have gone home and thought about something else. But there it is, amid the general amnesia, I have total recall, I remember everything clearly. One cannot be loyal without memory, and, as I have said, I am loyal. Yes, mon capitaine, of the two of us I am the one who betrayed the Republic and yet I am the one who proved himself loyal. I am not talking about Eternal France, the integrity of the Nation, the honour of arms or of the flag, all those flimsy, ill-considered abstractions upon which you sought to build your life, I am talking about the concrete and fragile things of which we were the trustees, the howling of Si Messaoud’s whores, my seminarist’s tears, the foolish giggling of the girls at the Milk Bar, the song sung by the harki, Belkacem, whom you and your like abandoned to his death in 1962 in the name of your peculiar sense of duty, I am speaking of everything that you betrayed without the slightest qualm, and it is to this alone that I owe my loyalty, it does not matter that in the end it should all be totally forgotten. But you do not care about the world, you are sunk in bemused contemplation of the exceptional tragedy it has been your lot to live through, you are still asking yourself how it was possible for you to become a torturer and a murderer. Oh, but it is the truth, mon capitaine, there is nothing impossible about it: you are a torturer and a murderer. There is nothing you can do about it now, even if you are still unable to accept it. The past disappears and is forgotten, but nothing can undo it. No-one cares about you anymore, apart from yourself. The world no longer knows who you are and God does not exist. No-one will punish you for what you have done, no-one will grant you the redemption along with the chastisement your pride demands. Your prayers are vain. Have you learned nothing? Are you so irremediably blind? You have lived through nothing exceptional, mon capitaine, the world has always teemed with men like you, and no victim has ever had the slightest difficulty in turning himself into a torturer, given the tiniest change in circumstances. Remember this, mon capitaine, it is a brutal lesson, timeless and brutal, the world is old, it is so old, and men’s memories are so short. What has been played out in your life has already been played out on similar stages an incalculable number of times, and the millennium just beginning will offer nothing new. It is no secret. Our memories are short. We disappear like generations of ants and everything has to start all over again. The world is a hopeless teacher, all it is capable of doing is repeating the same things over and over again and we are recalcitrant pupils, not until the lesson has been painfully inscribed into our own flesh do we pay attention, we look elsewhere and are noisily indignant as soon as we are brought into line. If life had not made a soldier of you, mon capitaine, if you had not been obliged to sit in the front row in class, you, too, would have been indignant, you might have sent articles of protest to your friends at L’Humanité, you might have held forth about the inalienable rights of every human being, about their dignity, contemplating your own elegant, unsullied white hands with admiration all the while, never dreaming for a moment that a torturer’s heart beats in your breast. But life did not allow you to enjoy this luxury. You know all about the dignity of human beings, you know what men are worth, including you and me. When we got to the camp in Vietnam after the battle of Dien Bien Phu, I remember it very well, it was you who first taught me this, as you taught me so many other things. We were sitting there, exhausted and hungry, with a group of prisoners and you said to me, I know what a camp is, Horace, in a few days’ time we shall not be able to count on most of our comrades, what you will see making his appearance is man and you will have to learn to defend yourself against him, man, naked man, those were your very words, I remember clearly and you were right. Have you forgotten? Have you ended up convincing yourself that you were superior to the human species? Men are not worth very much, mon capitaine. Generally speaking they are worth nothing. They cannot be singled out according to their worth. The only thing to go by is partiality. All you can do is to recognize your own people and be loyal to them. But for you that is impossible, you cannot help making judgements, your inordinate passion for making judgements is such that, not content with judging yourself, you did not hesitate for a second to dishonour yourself and all of us with you, in order to win the esteem of a man like Tahar, and even today you are ready to seek absolution from anyone who comes along, like a young lad ashamed of groping the maid. Yours is a strange pride, mon capitaine. But I ask you this – who can judge us? The God you believe created this world? The nation in whose name we have fought throughout our lives and which has shown its gratitude by relegating us to the stinking lower depths of its bad conscience? They sentenced me to death, mon capitaine, then they pardoned me and granted me amnesty and while they had the right to kill or spare me, that makes no odds, they did not have the right to condemn or pardon me, and in no case did they have the right to grant me amnesty, they have no right to judge us, we are beyond their comprehension, their blame or praise are nothing. I should so have liked you to come to realize this. We have received the world’s lesson, we have attended to its timeless, brutal teaching, and we have both, you and I, been the instruments of its pitiless pedagogy. Yes, you too, mon capitaine. Every time you exposed their nakedness to the light, each time metal and flesh penetrated their bodies, each time you stopped their eyes closing, when you brought them back into consciousness by force, with each breath of air refused, with each burn, you, too, were in the business of educating all those who passed through your hands. But you were never present at their deaths and you cannot know how it was. I have seen so many men die, mon capitaine, I was closer to them than their own mothers and I can assure you that they had all learned something, something important, a truth Tahar never knew because you did not want him to receive even a little rough treatment. At night we would drive out of the city and fly over the bay, they would be silent in the back of the lorry or in the helicopter, they would not weep, they would not beg, there was neither any desire or rebellion left in them, and they toppled into the common grave without a cry, they plummeted into the sea in a long, silent fall, they were not afraid, I know because I looked into the eyes of every one of them, as was my duty, mon capitaine, death is a serious matter, but they were not afraid, we gave them a gentle death, we did that for them, they returned my gaze, they could see my face and their eyes were empty, I remember distinctly, there was no trace of hatred to be found in them, no judgement, no yearning, there was no longer anything there, apart, perhaps, from tranquillity and relief at being finally liberated, for thanks to us, mon capitaine, none of them could fail to be unaware that the body is a tomb.