Читать книгу A French Novel - Frédéric Beigbeder - Страница 7

I am older than my great-grandfather. Capitaine Thibaud de Chasteigner was thirty-seven years old when he fell during the second battle of Champagne, on 25 September 1915 at 9.15 a.m. between the valley of Suippe and the outskirts of the Argonne forest. I had to pester my mother to find out more; the hero of the family is an unknown soldier. He is buried at the Borie-Petit château, in Dordogne (my uncle’s place), but I saw his photograph in the château Vaugoubert (belonging to another uncle): a tall, thin young man in a blue uniform, with cropped fair hair. In his last letter to my great-grandmother, Thibaud says he has no wire-cutters to clear a path to the enemy’s lines. He describes the flat, chalky landscape, the incessant rain turning the ground into a muddy swampland, and confides that he has received the order to attack the following morning. He knows he will die; his letter is like a ‘snuff movie’ – a horror film made using no special effects. At dawn, he fulfilled his duty, singing the ‘Chant des Girondins’: ‘To die for one’s country is the most noble, most enviable destiny!’ The men of the 161st Infantry Regiment launched themselves into a hail of bullets; as intended, my great-grandfather and his men were ripped to shreds by the German machine guns and asphyxiated with chlorine gas. It might be said that Thibaud was murdered by his superior officers. He was tall, he was young, he was handsome, and La France ordered him to die for her. Or rather – and this gives his fate a curious topicality – La France ordered him to commit suicide. Like a Japanese kamikaze or a Palestinian terrorist, this father of four sacrificed himself knowing precisely what he was doing. This descendant of the crusaders was doomed to imitate Jesus Christ: to give his life so that others might live.

I am descended from a gallant knight crucified on the barbed wire of Champagne.