The story of Lieutenant Grange is nothing but the story of Anyman in a vacant moment whereof the true occurrences are the vast metamorphoses of nature (the turn of the seasons, the sullen erosion of rock to sand, the woodland murmurs of sprouting and decay), and the miniscule transformations within a single body

It is the least oneiric book because the period it treats was itself a kind of waking dream.

There was,” Gracq observed in 1971, “the sentiment of a void, the sense of an enormous blank. Nothing occurred: there was an utterly somnambulistic aspect to everything. For everything continued as if nothing had happened. There was a paralysis, a putting-in-parenthesis, a prelude—to what? No one knew. It was pure anticipation.

even before the first cannonfire, the war’s rust and ruin, its odor of scorched earth, its spoiled wasteland, had already dishonored this still intact canton of luxuriant Gaul.

even here ugliness was not to be forgotten altogether: from time to time the train stopped at scaling, mud-colored little stations that clung to the embankment between the river and the cliff; against the military blue of the already dim windowpanes, soldiers in khaki were dozing on the mail wagons—then the green valley grew almost desolate for a moment: the train passed lugubrious yellow houses sliced out of the earth and apparently powdering the surrounding greenness with dust from the gypsum quarries

There was a lunge of abrupt and piercing life in that look, then the eyes were immediately veiled by a kind of whitish film and withdrew under the heavy lids; the expression became that of fatigue, but cunning withal, and concessive: behind this hooded falcon’s immobility, the talons were clearly in readiness.

The little town had vanished with its smoke; the odor of the great forests glided off the cliffs with the fog and drowned it to the depths of its factory alleys; nothing was left save the starry night and around him these miles and miles of forest. The afternoon’s enchantment returned. Grange realized that half his life was going to be restored to him: in wartime, the night is inhabited.

The bizarre coupling of this prehistoric mastaba with a ramshackle suburban cottage, surrounded by such hobo’s bric-a-brac in the heart of the forest, had something perfectly improbable about it.

Grange realized with a shock of incredulous delight that he was going to live here—that perhaps the war had its desert islands.

reading these pages that tracked down the unpredictable from comma to comma, Grange felt inexpressibly reassured: it was as though the war were already over.

The war was little by little falling asleep, the army yawning like a class that has handed in its papers, waiting for the bell and the end of maneuvers. Nothing would happen. Perhaps nothing would happen.

And suddenly the fairy-tale house didn’t quite reassure him any more. They slept here like sailors in the lull of hot nights, making for gray seas and trying to forget that the wind would be rising one of these days.

Grange realized he had been holding his breath for a moment and quickly stood up, shrugging his shoulders.

In the direction of the distant Meuse, the opposite slope, in the gaps between the trees, whitened vaguely with a sort of momentary false dawn, a silky palpitation of soft, sluggish flashes, like the great bubbles of light that regularly burst over valleys of blast furnaces: these gleams were the concrete casemates being constructed on accelerated schedules, poured at night under arc lights.

not that he believed them, but they landed in the silent, muffled life Grange had created for himself like a stone thrown into a pond that had seemed so inviting beneath its watery lens: in a second you saw how black the water was, and your nostrils filled with an obstinate rotten odor you couldn’t forget again.

The war? he wondered, shrugging his shoulders peevishly, “who knows if there even is a war? If there were, we’d hear about it.”

These provinces of the phony war were habitable, even comfortable, provided you lived in them as if the air’s oxygen content were lowered, as if the light had imperceptibly dimmed: it was a world where there was no longer any good news: you survived by ignoring all extremities, concealed by guilty stratagems that shifted with every wind, from minute to minute, at the thought of what might happen; a world, in fact, of diseases that were painless but annoyingly prone to take a turn for the worse—a world of prognosis reserved.

You can keep your stovepipe and all that goes with it. Along with the first armored units you’ll have engineers and motorized sections right away—and tough ones. And those bastards won’t come by the road, either: they’ll go around. They’ll come and knock very politely at your bank-vault door, but after a couple of hand grenades you can say good night.

There’s only one thing for you to do, my friend. . . .” He rested his hand lightly on Grange’s shoulder and stared into his eyes, no longer joking. “Some good advice in return for your good wine: if I were you I’d arrange to get a transfer. You know what I’d call this little place they’ve rented for you out here in the woods? Don’t let it upset you, but I’d call it a real hellhole. You’ll be caught in here like a rat in a trap.

it was surprising, in fact, that a war should be so inhabitable—its gesticulation remained wordless, as if observed through plate glass, as if an enormous bell jar had been lowered over the heart of Europe, over the world’s heart

best, now, was the drunken sleep on the brink; never before had France pulled the sheet over her head with this feverish hand, this taste of nausea in her mouth.

too dead a calm was ominous, but this night watch officially established them in an inoffensive war: it was reassuring.

this dimly wakened border where the patrolled forests of the war harbored a fabulous, enchanted silence that was somehow alive and alert fascinated Grange, intrigued him.

When Grange awakened, a white and sourceless light oozed up from the earth, blurring the shadow of the windowframes against the ceiling; but his first impression was less that of unaccustomed brightness than of an abnormal suspension of time itself

Over six inches of snow and construction, convoys, maneuvers, transport, communications, target practice—all the daily grindings and gnashings of machinery stopped as though bewitched: the roof garrison became a horde stupefied by hibernation, little groups burrowing into the warm holes of their stoves and igloos. The orders slept, unopened, on the captain’s desk.

in 1914 for the last time, perhaps, men had left home with the idea of returning for the harvest; in 1939 they had exchanged their country dances for the movies, but it was without looking back that they left, knowing in their heart of hearts they would see only a land the fire had passed over.

he glanced at her, her waist so slender in her close-fitting blouse, with a shadow of anxiety; he thought of those wasps which instinctively know where to sting in order to paralyze their prey.

Now that the winter was advancing, it was the cavalry maneuvers that seemed to worry him, for everyone knew (the cavalrymen themselves made no secret of it) that in case of a German attack the cavalry was to deploy its units far ahead of the lines in Belgium. But when he tried to decipher the extremely fragmentary orders that reached Les Falizes, Grange was astonished by the perspective that appeared: obviously the cavalry’s advance ahead of the lines mattered less than its manner of retreat behind them.

For this silence, now distinctly irritating, was a hunger, and yawning made him think not so much of boredom as of the fearful gape of jaws which meant something quite different. The winter was growing old—he felt its peace cracking like the floating island in Jules Verne which, day by day, the thaw diminished.

If someone had reminded him of the curious forgetfulness that put the Army of the Meuse between parentheses, he would have been rather shocked. He never thought of it, that was all, strange as it seemed—and probably he would not have enjoyed exploring his motives.

Luckily, these were Ardennes kilometers, allergic to armies, as anyone could see: in 1914 Joffre had come to grief over them and the lesson had not been wasted. Grange observed with satisfaction the enormous green stain which thrust its tentacles from Liége to beyond the Meuse; as far as forests went, it was about as serious an obstacle as you could find

There’s not one gun in two ready to fire in the whole blockhouse line after this rotten snow.

At heart, he’s on Lucifer’s side, Grange realized, startled by the sympathy that impelled him toward the captain, only he’s a specialist: he sees God with stars on his shoulders.

What most reminded him of his exaltation at Les Falizes, where he seemed to breathe as never before, was the beginning of summer vacations in his childhood—the fever seizing him as soon as he could look out the train windows, still miles away from the coast, and see the trees gradually shrink, stunted by the salt wind—the anxiety suddenly filling his throat at the mere thought that his room in the hotel might not overlook the sea.

“Unheimlich,” he thought: there was no French word; he studied them with a mixture of repugnance and fascination. Outside, the heavy rain of the Ardennes was beginning to fall with the darkness, its drumming muffled by the snow. Unconsciously, he strained to hear the occasional noises from the crew room, afraid of being surprised, as if he were poring over obscene photographs.

“Odd,” Grange thought, “that in this age of lightning wars it should be not an army but a colony that settles on our frontiers. Another year or two and this army will send down roots: it was a sign that already, at Moriarmé and elsewhere, a third of the officers have sent for their wives; I myself . . .”

This war with neither soul nor songs, which had never created a popular mentality, which in each man discreetly murmured I and never we, imprisoning only the private universe, disoriented the country infinitely less than the city, for here it did not function contrary to the mind’s habits: the egoistic, short-run calculation, and the resigned, somewhat magical frequentation of a future evasive by nature.

Perhaps for many years now the country would transplant, secrete on its frontiers, a population de luxe, a violent, idle military caste depending for its daily bread on the civilians and finally demanding it of them, as the desert nomads levy tribute on the cultivated regions.

a vague doubt stirred in the pit of his stomach, an animal suspicion that oppressed him as if some calculation of faces, suddenly conspicuous, had grossly, inexplicably erred as to scale.

There was a confused but powerful charm in sprawling in this besotted boat that had thrown its helm, then its oars overboard—the curious charm of drifting with the current.

What they had left behind, what they were supposed to protect, no longer mattered very much: the lines were cut; in this darkness full of forebodings all raisons d’être had lost their hold.

There remained only a pure, blind waiting: the starry night, the forgotten forest, the enormous tide that swelled behind the horizon brutally stripped them all, as the sound of waves breaking behind dunes creates a sudden nakedness.

The sound did not seem earthly; it involved, rather, the whole vault of the sky, which suddenly became a solid firmament and began to vibrate like a sheet of tin

The little groups of civilians standing at the roadside—appearing by magic out of the empty woods to watch the procession—raised a few cheers when the first tanks passed, but they soon left off, discouraged: now they were waiting as if for a long freight train to pass; the men on the tanks rode by, mute, indifferent, and almost allegorical, like firemen sitting in rows along their ladders.

The airplane put the infantry back in an earlier age, reviving the convoy of salt-smugglers, the gay chouannerie of the hedge-wars, the warpath of the Last of the Mohicans.

There was a gloomy, almost military rhythm in this column with nothing of the sordid pathos of farms abandoned in panic, barnyards full of feathers split from slashed eiderdowns.

The men in the crew room ate to pass the time, munching on bread and pieces of chocolate: you could tell the war had actually begun by the sound of grinding jaws that filled the silences.

Grange remembered how on August 2, 1914, his whole town had gathered on the quay with their dinners on their laps, for a gigantic picnic. Everyone brought chairs outdoors—to be within reach of signs. Some one saw a flag in the moon, someone else mentioned a tidal wave that was moving up the river: it was some experiment with a mysterious explosive: Turpin powder. The memory was one of the delights of his childhood. They had forgotten to send him to bed that night; the world was in its second childhood.

Neither the planes nor the bombs had stirred his imagination—even the Roof suddenly blooming with its columns of smoke still looked a little like a natural phenomenon to him.

But with “the cavalry wounded” he was suddenly touched; the words opened a valve somewhere, unlocked a door that led to a new country.

It was a quick, isolated flash, with nothing of the soft palpitation of heat lightning; instead it was as if a heavy hammer behind the horizon were pounding out red-hot iron on an enormous anvil with regular strokes.

Then it seemed to Grange that things happened very quickly. He was scarcely halfway back to the blockhouse when a powerful whine of motors began to burrow and thunder through the forest on all sides at once, with the unceremoniousness of a troop of beaters going into a thicket, and suddenly the whole Roof shivered with the tremendous racket of bombs and machine guns.

What he noticed was their peaceful, easy movement of fish in water, the way they had of spreading out so comfortably high in the air, ignoring one another, like schools of fish that cross without noticing it, each going about its business at different levels in the transparency of the deeps.

The procession was heading for the Meuse—an avalanche in a tunnel of dust, the muddy, rumbling stream roaring like a herd of water buffalo running from a jungle fire toward a ford in the river.

It was four in the afternoon. Behind the forest, with the dry click of a circuit being cut, the bridges over the Meuse were exploding, one after another.

And the fear returned, no longer the hot, brutal breath of panic that had catapulted them inside the blockhouse, but a marvelous, almost appealing terror that Grange felt rising from the depths of his childhood—from fairy tales: the terror of children lost in the woods at twilight, listening to the faraway branches crack beneath the dreadful heels of the seven-league boots.

As the moments passed, Grange felt braced by unreal security, a paradoxical result of the battle’s giant strides which had overstepped them.

“Maybe I’m on the other side,” he mused happily; never had he felt so close to himself. He began to whistle and took off his helmet which he swung beside him from its chin strap, like a basket; now and then he touched his pistol butt in its unbuckled holster; all sense of danger had faded, but the touch of the weapon cooled his finger tips; he encouraged this strange new sense of self-sufficiency, of carrying everything he possessed on his back.

There was a terror so naked in these round, red, apparently lidless eyes that the man seemed tiny and imponderable: one might have picked him out from behind that tree trunk with one hand.

He felt a sudden revulsion at the pit of his stomach, as if he had run into the sea across a cold beach: he recognized the fear of being killed; but a part of himself stood aside, floating on the current of the buoyant night: he felt something of what the passengers in the ark must have felt when the waters first lifted it off the ground.

Yet if French troops had appeared on the road just then, if some reinforcement had come to the rescue, he would have felt cheated.

Grange began to understand why a lost troop of men instinctively marches into cannonfire: the emptiness of a field of battle was a kind of disequilibrium, like an affliction of the ears; the world without sight or sound lost its moorings, sinking, deaf and blind, through layers of soft sargasso weed.

In the circle of the binoculars, behind the smashed windshield, the seat seemed empty, but the branches hanging down over the road kept Grange from seeing it distinctly. One of the front tires had been torn open. In any case, the first glance settled all questions: the truck was dead, dead the way a man can be dead, already a prey to the weeds, subject to a livid discoloration that must have been the dust of the shattered windshield; it looked like a fly wrapped up in a spiderweb.

“It’s not so much as if we were going to be killed,” Grange reflected, moistening his dry gums with his tongue. “It’s strange—it’s more as if we were going to be punished.”

“Shit!” Hervouët finally whispered, furious. A vague, appalling ghost of the sacred suddenly appeared in the forest, conjured out of the depths of the army barracks: they had laid hands on the arcana. No one could foresee the consequences.

He felt only an emptiness in his head and a coolness at his temples—he was very near fainting, wanted to faint, and then, strangely beyond fainting, experienced a relief which was the comfort of a page turned, and the day over.

rather than leave the faces covered and the feet showing, which seemed to Grange like some hideous joke, they had pulled the coat down over the feet. And in order not to see the faces any more, they had turned the bodies on their flank, side by side, faces toward the concrete wall.

he felt lost, really lost, far from all paths: no one was expecting him any more—ever—anywhere. This moment seemed delicious to him.

he realized that once he had closed this door a line was drawn, an epilogue had been pronounced: his brief wartime adventure had come to an end. What surprised him was the void created around him: a ghostly, yawning, stale void that drew him in.

I was afraid, and yet I wanted it,” he decided. “I was expecting something to happen. I had made room for something. . . .” He knew something had happened, but he felt it had not been real: the war continued to hide behind its ghosts, the world around him went on draining away in silence.

he leaned over until his nose was almost pressing against the mirror—but the shadow remained vague, eaten away by the darkness: life did not connect with itself: there was nothing but this approximate confrontation with a dim shadow he could not really make out.