Date: Sun, 03 Jun 2007 09:13:08 +0200 From: A.K. Subject: Malgre tout 03/13 (Historical) ---------------------------- MALGRE TOUT by Andrej Koymasky (C) 2007 written on October 18, 1993 translated by the author English text kindly revised by John ----------------------------- USUAL DISCLAIMER "MALGRE TOUT" is a gay story, with some parts containing graphic scenes of sex between males. So, if in your land, religion, family, opinion and so on this is not good for you, it will be better not to read this story. But if you really want, or because YOU don't care, or because you think you really want to read it, please be my welcomed guest. ----------------------------- CHAPTER 3 - Loving in silence In Epinal they received their uniforms and chassepots. That year, the month of August was hot and sultry. They were taught to use the guns - to put the fuse, to tamp the powder well, to put the bullet in the barrel, to aim, to light the fuse, to shoot. After a few days of training, they were judged soldiers ready for the battle. Then they were also taught the signals, the orders, the main ways of deployment. Jacques was studying his comrades, trying to guess their characters from their features, their expressions, and their reactions. Instinctively he was feeling that, once they were on the battlefield, having a trusted comrade nearby could mean the difference between life and death. When his company was sent to the front, Jacques had singled out amongst his comrades a young man two years older than him, who before becoming a soldier was a cellar-man, and whose name was Michel Lacroix. Jacques had studied him for a long time, during their training. He liked Michel's easygoing smile, his way of singing the cellar-songs making expressive faces and gestures, he liked his clear and limpid eyes, his sweet and sensual lips, his hands, broad but skilled. Their eyes had met often. Gradually, Jacques started to feel attracted by Michel, and after attraction, fascination took over. Michel was not handsome like Sylvestre, but was strong, virile, and merry. And Jacques noticed that when his comrade looked at him, his smile seemed to become accentuated, his look seemed to linger longer on him than on the other comrades. But the two boys found each near the other side by side for the first time, only when they marched towards the front. Michel gave him a smile and a sign of recognition . "I can't remember your name." He said with a warm voice. "Jacques Marandin." "Ah, yes, Jacques. I am..." "Michel Lacroix, right?" "I noticed you in the past days, you know? You're different from the others, here..." "Different? How different?" "I dunno. It's just a feeling. But I like you." Jacques felt slightly excited and, almost trembling, answered, "I too like you, a lot. I would like us to be friends." "Friends? From now on we are friends." Michel answered with simplicity. During their first halt they laid down under the same tree. The way it happens between two people who want to become friends, they started to tell each other about their lives, about themselves, their thoughts. So Jacques came to know that Michel had left at his village a fiancée, an eighteen-year-old washerwoman called Sylvie. He likes girls, Jacques thought with some regret. But he anyway held his friendship with Michel dear, even though in his heart he had hoped that something different, deeper, more intimate could arise between them. The glances and smiles of his comrade had made him hope that it would be possible, so now he was just slightly disappointed. But Michel was treating him with warmth and liking anyway, and this pleased him regardless. Lying near that young man, not handsome but at least attractive, gave him a strong hard-on that, happily he noticed, his uniform hid. Could he ever experience the pleasure that two lovers can exchange? he was asking himself. Could he ever unite with a man, as some years before he had seen those two doing, the miller and the farrier's assistant, there amongst the bushes near the stream? He thought that he possibly would never have this luck in all his life. Also because he was going to the front and therefore he couldn't know how much life he still had in front of him. "Do you ever think about death, Michel?" "No, never, why?" "War... means death." "Not necessarily. At my village I listened at the veterans' telling about the battles they fought. I intend to tell them in my turn, when I get old. I intend to survive. We are young..." "Possibly yes... but Prussians are also young like us..." "They are enemies. They don't count." "But they want to survive too, so we don't count for them either. Thus... us or them. And possibly both, us and them." "You have not to think so, if you really want to survive. I feel immortal. You have to feel so too, Jacques. You have to express a desire, and believe that it will be fulfilled... and it becomes real..." "If only it could be so easy..." Jacques answered thinking of his desire towards Sylvester, before, and Michel now. Michel shook his head, amused, "You have to believe it and it will become real. Sooner or later." He repeated, self-assuredly. "But when your desire is about another person, and possibly this other person desires exactly the opposite thing..." Jacques said. "The one who has the stronger desire wins. Were you in love with a girl who was in love with another?" "More or less yes, it is so." "Well, you have to go on desiring her and who knows, after the war, when you will go back covered with glory, shining in your uniform, you will see that she'll fall into your arms like a ripe fruit." "But if meanwhile she got married?" "Is it possible that you really have to be so pessimistic?" "There are things that cannot happen..." Jacques commented thinking that love between men was such a thing, even though he knew that, at least those two there near the stream, at least on that day, had realized their desire, even though in secret, even though dangerously. Who knows how it could have ended had it not been him who caught them in the act but someone else? Why were two men not allowed to love each other, to make love safely together? Or else, why did he never feel attracted by a woman? How much simpler everything would have been, in one case or the other... Michel interrupted his thoughts. "I made love with Sylvie all night long, before I had to leave my village. It was great. But I miss her already. She gave me a lock of her hair to bring with me as a good-luck charm." Jacques nodded and looked at the ring that Sylvester gave him as a lucky charm. Made it turn on his finger. He recalled Sylvester bathing in the little lake, lying naked under the sun, and at times appeasing his excitement by masturbating, unaware, under his attentive gaze full of love. But now, Michel's image was coming alongside and superimposing on Sylvestre's image. Even though so different. Michel whose naked body he had not yet a chance to see but whom he desired with the same desire that had so much inflamed him towards Sylvestre. When, after they resumed their march, they camped for the night, Michel managed to stay near Jacques. They spread their blankets, pulled off their boots and laid down, using their rucksacks as pillows. Crickets were filling the air with their sharp and persistent chirping. Here and there, from the dying fires quiet gleams and cracklings were coming. The gun pyramids were standing out against the dark sky, just revealed by the reflections of the embers. Sentinels were watching over the perimeter of the improvised encampment. The bugle had sounded the silence signal, and now only subdued whispers were arising from time to time from the dark shapes of the soldiers' bodies lying down, waiting for sleep. "Are you sleeping, Michel?" "No, not yet." "Are you thinking of your Sylvie?" "No, I was thinking of you." "Of me? And what were you thinking?" "That I'm glad we are friends, Jacques. I feel safer about what awaits for us. When I left my village, I decided I had to find a friend, but didn't think I could find one so fast, and not one like... like you." Jacques didn't answer and instead asked himself what attracted him to Michel, and it seemed that pondering upon it now that he could not see him, could better help him to understand. Well, his voice, without any doubt. Warm, sensual, friendly. But then recalled Michel's eyes - how they looked at him, so deep, always a little merry, careful, and almost caressing. He recalled his friend's lips, and how much they attracted him, straight, full, sensual... he would have liked to be kissed by those lips. And Michel's big hands, those hands so skilled when he handled the chassepot, when they transformed useless objects in curious, beautiful things, useless maybe but agreeable to be looked at. Those hands that Jacques would have loved to feel on his skin, on his body. And then he thought of his friend's body, that the uniform concealed and that he, instead, would like to unveil, see, and touch... But Jacques didn't dare to express these feelings, let them transpire, not even make his friend guess them. Michel talked often about his girlfriend. He was clearly interested in her and not in Jacques, and the man was aware of that. But he could not restrain himself from daydreaming about a relationship with his likeable comrade. And mainly when they were lying one near the other as at that moment. Their friendship was growing, strengthening, was becoming more and more intimate... even more dangerously intimate for Jacques. And then one day they reached the front. They first heard their enemy, the noise of their shots, and then they saw him. It was an innumerable force, an immense crowd. And they engaged in battle. It was a butchery game - wave on wave, the soldiers of the two formations were clashing, shooting on the crowd, moving forward, loading, aiming with large approximation, shooting. Men were falling, on one side and on the other; like puppets of which the strings have been suddenly cut, they collapsed, their uniforms changing colour, dyed with blood. The smell of blood, of gunpowder, of earth and grass trampled by too many feet, melted in that open air slaughterhouse, where in the evening the unreal silence of fear, of suffering, of death was spreading; a silence broken by the moaning of those that death had not yet gripped but just badly brushed. At night, after each clash, Michel and Jacques laid down, one beside the other, amazed to be still living, grateful to be still together. The talked very little. The horror of the nearby shambles, the cries of the dying men didn't allow them... The two friends sought relief in a sleep that was late to come and when it came was interrupted by the least noise. "How long will it last?" Jacques asked in a whisper to Michel. "Who knows... They are so many, those bastards. Let's hope we receive reinforcements." Michel murmured. "We are withdrawing, it seems to me." "The sarge says it is strategy..." "What's strategy? What's it mean?" "That it is not that we are losing ground, but we are just going to a more favourable place for us, tricking the bastards to better bump them off." "Ah... and couldn't we wait for them where we already were?" "But they possibly would have not come where we were..." "And now, why would they come?" "Because they think they are winning." "And meanwhile they kill us..." "We kill the bastards too." "Is it possible that there isn't any other way? Why do we have to kill each other? We kill them and they kill us?" "Because they are bastards. They want to steal our Alsace and Lorraine." "But neither of us is from those regions..." "But if we let them have them, afterwards they possibly would want our regions too." "Why would they?" "Because they are bastards, I told you. They want out land, our women." "Don't they have land, women?" "Not as beautiful as ours." Jacques was thinking about what Michel was telling him, but was only half convinced, and he would possibly have been not convinced at all if he were not in love with his comrade. When the withdrawal order came, in spite of the forced march, there were some days of relative quiet for the soldiers of the contingent. When they had to cross the Moselle, most of the soldiers profited by washing themselves in the river. It was a real relief, after days and days when they could not wash. Also their uniforms saturated with dust, benefitted from that. But for Jacques it was above all the occasion to see his comrades diving naked in the river, and to play, wallow, horseplay on it. And he finally could see Michel's naked body. It was sound, slightly hairy mainly on the chest and on the legs. And he could also admire the firm and stocky member of his friend. This caused him a sudden erection, but he noticed that several comrades were in that same predicament and that nobody was caring about it, therefore after a slight initial embarrassment, he didn't care any more and enjoyed that fantastic show of hundreds and hundreds of naked male bodies, and mainly that of Michel near him. When they came out of the water they only partly dressed, waiting for their uniform jacket and trousers to dry under the warm September sun. In the evening they lit fires to prepare their mess. Not far away there was Epinal bridge, that they would cross the next day and where they would consolidate their bridgehead to stop the enemy. An unbroken line of wagons loaded with household goods was crossing the bridge at the last light of the day, while the sunset was still dyeing the sky red. They were the inhabitants of the places that would be invaded by the Prussian troops, now that the French had withdrawn along the Moselle. The long procession of refugees gave Jacques a deep feeling of sadness, only barely attenuated by Michel's proximity. But his friend also seemed less merry than usual. A movement drew the soldiers' attention. A group of mounted men arrived and stopped far off, near the officers' tents. One of the cavalrymen carried a tricolour flag and another an embroidered one. Only one of the horses was white. Shortly after a voice passed from mouth to mouth: it was the marshal Barzaire, the chief of the Lorraine army. Night fell and Jacques slept well for the first time in almost a month. In the morning they dismantled their camp, crossed the bridge and occupied their position. They were still mounting the new camp when the scouts' squad arrived announcing that the Prussians were coming. Immediately trumpet signals and dispatch riders gave the battle array orders. An apparent confusion seemed to sweep the camp but really the French army was efficiently deploying to face the approaching enemy. First to thunder were the field guns of the two parts. Jacques saw spurts of earth to rise here and there and lifeless bodies of his comrades fly into the air like disjointed marionettes. "Michel! I don't want to die like this! A hand-to-hand struggle is better!" the youth yelled. "Look where they come and run if one comes towards you." His comrade answered shouting. The trumpet sounded the order to the infantry to withdraw. Jacques and Michel ran with the others to keep themselves out of the guns' range. Happily it was not their duty to keep the bridge. From the border of the forest where they stopped and lined up, they were looking at the artillerymen busying around the field guns, the cavalry fighting in front of the bridge and, not far away, the houses of Epinal. Michel had a twig between his teeth and was nervously chewing it. "The bastards are making all our guns blow one after the other like skittles." He murmured, tense. Jacques looked at him. Michel had an intense, dark, almost grim look, and the play of his jaw muscles expressed all his tension. His hands were so violently gripping his gun that his knuckles were white. "Michel?" he called in a low voice. "What's up?" his friend asked, without looking at him. "Do you think that..." Jacques started to say but stopped when he saw Michel's expression. He looked where Michel was looking. The enemy was massing at the head of the bridge. French artillery was silent. The French cavalry engaged battle with the Prussian infantry that was pressing to invade the bridge. French cavalry moved back and waited on the other head of the bridge. Prussian infantrymen crossed the bridge in a stream that flew over the French side. The trumpet sounded the order to the French infantry to attack and Michel with Jacques and the others, ran down the slope yelling and brandishing their guns with the bayonet fixed at the barrel. But as soon as they were a few meters from the bridge, the Prussian infantry stopped and the Prussian artillery started to shoot on the French cavalry and infantry, producing wide gaps at each shot. Jacques was following Michel almost in contact. A huge roar shook Jacques, his eyes saw everything wave, going upside down, blackening. And everything was darkness and silence. ----------------------------- CONTINUES IN CHAPTER 4 ----------------------------- In my home page I've put some more of my stories. If someone wants to read them, the URL is http://andrejkoymasky.com If you want to send me feed-back, or desire to help revising my English translations, so that I can put on-line more of my stories in English please e-mail at andrej@andrejkoymasky.com ---------------------------