something like the empty stage of a theatre as if a clean-up crew had passed through pillagers or victors leaving behind only what had been too heavy or too burdensome to be carried away or really unusable not even the split suitcase was left and I didn’t see the pink rag or any flies either but certainly they must have been at work in other words at table buzzing coming in and out of the nostrils then still running we turned the corner of the wall and I no longer saw it, after all it was only a dead horse, a piece of carrion just good enough for the knacker: probably he would come by here along with the ragpickers and the scrap-iron men the dustmen picking up the forgotten or outmoded props now that the actors and the audience had gone, the sound of the cannons fading too, on the right now, to the west you could see a tall grey bell tower but can you tell if they had taken the village how can you tell, how can you tell, we could see their enigmatic names on the street signs the medieval milestones, Liessies lessees lessons Hénin henna Hirson hearse hirsute Fourmies formicary the whole brick-red villages the long train of black bugs crawling along the walls vanishing you wondered where in the staved-in doors the cracks the slightest crevice the least hole where even a cockroach wouldn’t have managed to get in flattening out vanishing disappearing each time a shell exploded in a dusty dirty cloud you never knew why in this rubble this city where there was nothing left but that wretched procession of ants and the four of us on our broken-down nags, but apparently they had a supply a stockpile to get rid of, maybe they had loaded them during the night and now they were firing only to avoid the bother of unloading and putting the shells in the munitions truck, women protecting their children fruit of their womb pressed against them carrying bundles of red eiderdowns whose feathers whose down spread behind them dragging the entrails the white guts of the houses that unravelled like streamers garlands sometimes caught on the trees and who is that saint whose torment I had seen represented in some picture the muscular executioners winding the livid bloody intestines coming out of his stomach on a reel, for a second time I saw the same poster they must have been at least a year old but these were trotting races horses harnessed not ridden, it wasn’t mine I was riding but the one belonging to some dead stranger probably it didn’t matter much but I regretted my new torch and that ham I had managed to find yesterday in a house that was already pillaged from top to bottom, a bad business to be in the cavalry covering a retreat coming through last when the rest have already looted everything: all we had found to eat in the last eight days had been fruit salad, the only thing to eat they had left behind, drinking out of the jars, the sugary sticky juice running out of both sides of our mouths, still on horseback throwing the jar away three-quarters full watching it break on the roadside impossible to carry it with us because it would have leaked out everywhere, and I regretted my toilet kit I would have liked to wash to have a bath to feel the water streaming over me the dead were all disgustingly dirty their blood was like excrement as if they had let go of everything but you can’t wash when you’re at war on top of the left saddlebag, buckled on by straps, was the standard brass basin, flattened, folded like a paper lantern for the horses to drink out of but we had mostly used them to shave in every time I think of those basins I see them full of water covered like a cataract with a bluish soapy film and against the rough sides clusters of bubbles, on the right was a pair of shears for cutting barbed wire, I wondered what that idiot of a dead man could have been carrying in his saddlebags they were swollen to the bursting point probably a dirty shirt maybe letters from a woman who was asking him Do you love me, what else did she want when I had done nothing but think of her for over four years maybe some socks too that she had knit for him in any case he must have been short because the stirrups were too short for me putting my knees too high and knocking them against the saddlebags when I was accustomed to ride long not like those monkeys or jockeys I had been meaning to lengthen them since I had been riding I kept telling myself that I would have to lengthen them one and even two notches but that was already an hour ago and I still wasn’t doing it thinking hoping from one moment to the next that he would still make up his mind to trot thinking Good God getting out of here crawling out of this ambush where all we did was parade ourselves through like targets but probably his dignity forbade it his race his caste his traditions unless it was simply his love of horses because he must undoubtedly have had to go at a terrific clip to get out of that ambush and maybe he simply decided that his horse needed rest even if it cost him his own life just as a little earlier he had cared enough to stop and let his horse drink: keeping his horse at a walk because he had ancestrally learnt that you have to let an animal breathe if you’ve just demanded a violent effort of it that was why we were walking aristocratically cavalierly at a majestic turtle’s gait he continuing as if there were no reason not to to talk with that little second lieutenant probably telling him about his equestrian successes and the advantages of a rubber bridle in races a magnificent target for those impenetrable Spaniards who were absolutely rebellious apparently allergic to the tearful homilies on universal brotherhood the goddess Reason the goddess Virtue and who were waiting for him ambushed behind the cork oaks or the olive trees I wonder what smell what odour death had then if it smelt like today not of gunpowder and glory as in poems but of those disgusting nauseating whiffs of sulphur and burnt grease the oily black weapons steaming smoking like a pot forgotten on the fire the stink of burnt fat of plaster of dust