Dog Island by Philippe Claudel

Author:Philippe Claudel [Claudel, Philippe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2021-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

XV

THE MAJORITY OF MEN ARE NOT AWARE OF THEIR DARKER side, which nevertheless everyone possesses. It is often circumstances that reveal it, wars, famines, disasters, revolutions, genocides. So when they contemplate it for the first time, in the secrecy of their conscience, they are appalled and they shudder.

The Mayor was confronted by all of this. He discovered nothing that he had not had a premonition about already. What was the point of lying to oneself? He was no longer a child. He had to face the facts: occasionally it is necessary to pass through darkness in order to observe once more the clarity of the dawning day. But he was not a monster, and neither did he hold all the cards. Did anyone actually hold them?

He remembered his grandfather, who had been sent off to the war in his youth, and who came back with one arm missing and his lungs destroyed. He spent his days sitting on a chair, in the kitchen, by the window. His sole occupation was to gaze at the Brau and to feed the birds with crumbs of bread which he placed on the window ledge. The hungriest or the stupidest birds ended on a skewer and he roasted them in the embers of the fire after he had plucked them and rubbed them with oil and garlic.

The Mayor remembered that the old man used to eat them whole, without cleaning them, cracking their tiny bones in his magnificent and very white teeth.

He had come back from the war wounded, but he had returned. One of the very few in his company. The others were all dead. Rebels. Loudmouths. Anarchists and idealists mostly, whom chance had thrown together and who had risen up in a frenzy against their commanding officers, against the war, against the foolishness of a conflict that had gone on for more than three years and had already caused millions of casualties. The NCOs took a dim view of this. The rebellious soldiers were too numerous to stand trial and be shot. That would have risked sowing the spirit of revolution in other minds. They chose rather to send them to take up an impossible or pointless position. A hill with no strategic significance, on which the enemy’s artillery could spew out its volleys of gunfire and bombs without causing the least concern. They would be forced to commit suicide. They chose to make them die so that the war could continue its work of mass death without disruption, the ultimate aim being to reshape the map of the world, the powers and the nations, at the dawn of a new century. Of what importance, comparatively, were the lives of a few hundred men, even if what they said was true, even if what they thought was right?

All this was politics. Politics is dirty. It is not moral. Certain men choose to remain clean, whereas others accept that they must get their hands dirty. Both are needed, even if the former are always respected and the latter come to be loathed.

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