“Because after all he knew how to ride. Have to give him his due: he knew what he was doing. Because he had got off to a damn good start,” Iglésia told them later; now they were crouching all three of them (Georges, Blum and he: the two young men and that Italian (or Spaniard) with olive skin and who himself had almost as many years behind him as the first two together, and probably something like ten times their experience, which must have made about thirty times that of Georges, because despite the fact that he and Blum were both apparently of the same age Blum possessed by heredity a knowledge (intelligence Georges had said, but it wasn’t only that: still more: the intimate atavistic experience, which had passed to the reflex stage, of human stupidity and wickedness) of things that was worth a good three times what a young man of good family could have gained from the study of the classical French Latin and Greek authors, and ten days of combat, or rather of retreat, or rather of a chase, where he -the young man of good family—had played the role of the game), all three, then, as different in age as in origin collected here from the four corners of the world (“All we need is a Negro,” Georges said. “What have we got already? Shem, Ham and Japhet, but we needed a fourth; we should have invited him: after all, it was harder to find this mess and bring it all here than to take off a wristwatch!”) crouching in that corner of the still unfinished camp behind piles of bricks and Iglésia cooking over a fire something they had stolen or bartered for (this time a part of the contents of a sack of flour Georges had received in exchange for his watch—the one that had been given to him by his two old aunts Marie and Eugénie when he had been awarded his first diploma—from, as it happened, a Negro—a Senegalese from the Colonial Regiment—who himself had pinched it God knows where (as had been pinched God knows where and brought into the camp God knows why—to what end? Probably on the off chance, for the superstitious pleasure of stealing, possessing and keeping—everything that could be found to sell, to buy or to barter, that is almost anything, the whole stock—and even more—of a department store, notions counter, antiques and staples included: not only useful or edible things—like the sack of flour—but even things without utility and even bothersome, and even incongruous things, like women’s stockings or books on philosophy, false jewels, tourist guidebooks, obscene photographs, parasols, tennis rackets, agricultural pamphlets, loudspeakers, tulip bulbs, accordions, birdcages—sometimes with the bird inside—bronze Eiffel Towers, clocks, preservatives, not to mention of course thousands of watches, chronometers, pigskin, crocodile or vulgar leather wallets that constituted the common coin of this realm, objects, relics, spoils painfully lugged kilometre after kilometre by hordes of exhausted and famished men, and hidden, concealed from searches, preserved despite prohibitions and threats, reappearing incoercibly for furtive, clandestine, feverish and hard bargainings whose object was most often not so much to acquire as to have something to sell or to buy), which, given the value of the watch, set on the pancake (for that was what Iglésia was making, pouring out on a piece of rusted iron the paste made of water, flour and a little of that coal-oil margarine distributed to the prisoners in tiny slices) a price which no proprietor of a three-star restaurant would have dared ask for a serving of caviar—so all three of them (one crouching, the other two keeping watch), like three famished vagabonds in one of those empty lots on the outskirts of cities, and nothing soldierly left (or rather, wearing those absurd rags that are the lot of defeated warriors, and not even their own but, as if the facetious conqueror, to make fun of them at their expense, had thrust them still deeper into their condition of victims, rubbish, debris, but probably it wasn’t even that: only the logical conclusion of orders, of arrangements perhaps rational in their origin but lunatic at the stage of execution, as happens whenever an executive machinery sufficiently rigid, like the army, or sufficiently rapid, like revolutions, reflects to man without those retouches, that softening-up process provided by either an untrustworthy application or by time, the exact image of his naked thought), all three wearing, then, instead of their cavalrymen coats that had been taken away from them, overcoats of Czech or Polish soldiers received in exchange (soldiers dead perhaps, or perhaps—the coats—the spoils of war seized from untouched stockpiles in the Warsaw or Prague quartermaster stores), and of course not fitting, Georges’s with sleeves that came just below the elbow and Iglésia, more of a scarecrow, a clown than ever, swimming (his delicate jockey’s skeleton vanishing in a huge overcoat from which the carnival nose and the fingertips were all that emerged:) three ghosts three grotesque and unreal shadows with their fleshless faces, their eyes burning with hunger, their shaved skulls, their absurd clothes, leaning over a wretched clandestine fire in that ghostly setting of the barracks aligned on that sandy plain, with here and there on the horizon groves of pines and a motionless reddish sun, and other vague silhouettes wandering, approaching, circling angrily (abjectly) round them with envious, vulpine and feverish glances (and they too wearing those cast-off rags the colour of bile, of mud, as if a kind of corruption were covering them, corroding them, attacking them even as they stood, first their clothes, then spreading insidiously like the very colour of war, of earth, gradually taking possession, their faces ashen, their rags muddy, their eyes muddy too, with that filthy, vague tinge that already seemed to assimilate them to this clay, this mud, this dust from which they had sprung and to which, wandering, abject, dazed and sad, they returned a little more each day), and not even vulpine, that is, famished and emaciated and surly and threatening, but afflicted with that weakness only men betray, afflicted with reason, then, contrary to what would have happened if they had been real wolves, prevented from attacking by the very consciousness of what would have encouraged wolves to attack (their number), discouraged in advance by the calculation of what the wretched pancakes they lusted after would have represented once they were divided among a thousand, remaining there, then, merely prowling, with those murderous gleams in their eyes—and once a brick flew through the air, hit Iglésia’s shoulder and knocked over the iron plate and the half-cooked dough spilt into the fire, and Georges tossed the brick he was holding ready in the direction of the man running away (and probably it had not even been thrown with the intention of murder or aggression, but despair, and that unendurable rat of hunger gnawing at his belly, and the gesture then—the brick thrown -uncontrolled, uncontrollable, and immediately afterwards the miserable flight, not because of the reprisal, out of fear, but because of his own shame, his own failure), Iglésia scraping up the dough as well as he could, replacing the iron plate and starting the pancake over again, and now there were black pieces of coal in it that they tried to take out later, but some still remained, and when they ate the pancake these grated against their teeth with an indefinable taste and made them spit, but they swallowed everything all the same, down to the last crumb, sitting like monkeys on their heels, burning their fingers pulling the pancakes off the stove—or rather off the piece of rusty iron that served as a stove—Iglésia (once he had started, talking incessantly, slowly but continuously, patient and, apparently, for himself, not for them, his huge eyes staring at nothing, astonished, grave and at the same time admiring) saying between two mouthfuls: “And with the other bastards riding in that race it couldn’t have been easy, I tell you, because any owner who rides in a race with professional jockeys can’t expect them to make him any presents. Only he had started off damn well: he was in fourth position now, and all he had to do for the moment was to keep her there, and he would have his hands full with that, I can tell you, because that animal could pull worse than anything, the bitch . . .”