And Blum: “But didn’t you yourself say that they found him stark naked? How can you explain that? Unless it was the effect of his reverence for Nature? Of his affecting Genevese readings? Wasn’t he—I mean that melomaniac Swiss, the effusive philosopher whose complete works he had learnt by heart—wasn’t he a little bit exhibitionistic too? Wasn’t he the one who enjoyed showing his behind to young gi . . .” and Georges: “Oh stop! For God’s sake stop, stop! How boring you can get! Stop long enough to . . .” then his voice breaking off (or perhaps he himself no longer hearing it) while he stared now without recognizing him, in other words without identifying the face as being Blum’s, but only the countenance of misery, of suffering, of absolute nakedness, the mask with its emaciated features, drawn, famished, like a tragic denial of the gaiety, the clownishness of the voice, while he felt as if he were living it all over again: that lonely agony, those hours of the night, the silence (perhaps only, in the old sleeping mansion, the muffled echo of a horse whinnying in the stable, and perhaps too the black, silky, restless, wandering wind, whirling in sporadic gusts into the courtyard), and Reixach standing there, in that setting of a period print, stripping himself, tearing off, rejecting, repudiating those clothes, that ambitious and gaudy uniform which had now probably become for him the symbol of something he had believed in and now no longer saw any sense in (the blue frock coat with the high collar and the gold-embroidered lapels, the two-cornered hat, the ostrich feathers: the pathetic and grotesque costume lying there, a crumpled mausoleum of what (not power, honours, glory, but the idyllic bosky dells, the idyllic and sentimental reign of Reason and Virtue) his readings had given him a glimpse of); and something inside himself finally disintegrating shaken by a kind of terrifying diarrhoea that fiercely emptied him of his contents as of his very blood, and not moral, as Blum said, but somehow mental, that is, no longer an interrogation, a doubt, but no longer any subject for interrogation, for doubt, saying aloud (Georges): “But the General killed himself too: not only the one seeking and finding on that road a decent and disguised suicide, but the other one too in his villa, his garden with the raked gravel paths . . . You remember that military review, that ceremony, the soaking field that winter morning in the Ardennes, and he—it’s the only time we saw him—with his little jockey’s head, that kind of tiny, wrinkled, wizened and parboiled apple, his little jockey’s legs in the tiny shiny boots that splattered indifferently through the mud while he passed in front of us without looking at us: a little old man or rather a little old foetus that had just been taken out of its jar of formaldehyde, marvellously well preserved, unchangeable, alert, expeditious and dry, quickly walking along the serried squadrons trailing behind him that group of beribboned, gloved officers, the hilts of their sabres at the hollow of their elbows, and panting as they followed him over the spongy field while he walked on without turning back, probably talking to the veterinary officer—the only one he would have spoken to—of the state of the horses and the bad case of thrush the ground gave them—or the climate—in this part of the country); and then when he learnt, that is when he realized, finally understood that his brigade no longer existed, had been not annihilated, destroyed according to the rules—or at least what he thought were the rules—of war: normally, correctly, as for instance, by attacking an impregnable position or even by an artillery pounding, or even—he might have accepted this as a last resort—submerged by an enemy attack: but so to speak absorbed, diluted, dissolved, erased from the general-staff charts without his knowing where nor how nor when: only the couriers returning one after the other without having seen a thing at the place—the village, the woods, the hill, the bridge—where a squadron or a combat group was supposed to be, and even that resulting, according to all appearances, not from a panic, a flight, a rout—a mishap that he could also have acknowledged perhaps, at least have recognized as being in the realm of disastrous but, all in all, normal possibilities, comprising part of the anticipated, the inevitable risks of any battle and which could be remedied by means equally anticipated, as for instance a police barrier at the crossroads and a few summary executions—not a rout, then, since the order the courier was carrying, was supposed to transmit, was invariably an order to fall back and since the position the unit was supposed to be holding and towards which it was headed was itself a retreat position but which, apparently, no one had ever reached, the couriers then continuing farther, in other words towards the preceding retreat position, without ever seeing, on either side of the road, anything but that inextricable, monotonous and enigmatic wake of disasters, in other words not even trucks or burnt wagons, or men, or children, or soldiers, or women, or dead horses, but simply detritus, something like a vast public discharge spread over kilometres and kilometres and exuding not the traditional and heroic odour of carrion, of corpses in a state of decomposition, but only of ordure, simply stinking, the way a pile of old tin cans, potato peels and burnt rags can stink, and no more affecting or tragic than a pile of ordure, and just barely usable for scrap-metal collectors or ragpickers, and nothing more until, still advancing, they (the couriers) took—at a turn of the road—another burst of gunfire, which made one more corpse at the bottom of the ditch, the overturned motorcycle still sputtering or catching fire, which made one more of those black cadavers still sitting on one of those twisted and rusty iron carcasses (have you noticed how fast it goes, that acceleration of time, the extraordinary speed with which the war produces phenomena—rust, stains, putrefaction, corruption of bodies—which in ordinary times usually take months or years to happen?) like some macabre caricatures of motorcyclists still leaning over their handlebars, riding at a terrible speed, decomposing that way (spreading beneath them in the green grass the bituminous and excremental brownish blob—oil, grease, burnt flesh—consisting of a dark sticky liquid) at a terrible speed—the couriers, then, returning one after the other without having found anything, or not coming back at all, his brigade somehow evaporated, conjured away, erased, sponged out without leaving a trace save a few dazed, wandering men hidden in the woods or drunk, and finally I had a minimum of consciousness left, sitting in front of that tiny cone of gin that now I no longer even had the strength to empty while slumped down on the bench overpowered by my own weight I was trying with that obstinate consciousness of drunkards to get up and go away, realizing that they (Iglésia and that old man whom we had first robbed then almost killed, and who had then offered to take us through the lines after dark) were just as drunk as I was, starting again without being discouraged to lean my body forward so that its own weight helped me get up from that bench to which I seemed to be nailed at the same time that my hands attempted to push back the table, realizing at the same moment that these various movements remained at the stage of impulses and that I was still absolutely motionless, a kind of ghostly and transparent double of myself—and without the slightest effect -repeating over and over the same gestures leaning my body forward the simultaneous effort of the thighs the arms pushing until it realized that nothing had happened coming back then melting back into my own body that was still sitting there which it tried to encourage once again but without any more success that was why I was trying to get my head clear thinking that if I could manage to settle clarify my perceptions I would also manage to order and direct my movements and then in succession: