The song used is « Le Chant des cerises », the « song of the cherries », the anthem of the Paris Commune in 1871.

VI. Trompe la mort… soldat ?

Verdun: February 1916.

Jean had come to find him, accompanied by two Romans and another Greek half-blood. Michel Desjardins was in the second line trench, along with Charles de La Roque. They formed a strange duo, the two magicians. At first, La Roque hated Desjardins. Both were from the same promotion to the Fourteenth, where Charles was a brilliant specialist in combat magic. However, at the front, he had found himself under Michel's orders, who was his staff sergeant. The fighting had calmed their enmity, which had gradually turned into comradeship and then mutual respect.

Jean d'Aubigné had returned from the United States to serve his country. He had offered his services directly to Raymond Poincaré and set up a shock brigade, made up essentially of mixed bloods and former Roman legionaries, all French or Belgian. Members of the Fourteenth served in the regular army. He had met Desjardins again, at a random front line, and recognized with surprise his childhood friend who had become a magician of Per Ankh in the meantime. That was as far as it went.

Yet, on this day, Jean d'Aubigné climbs up to the shelter where, sitting between food crates, Michel and Charles are waiting to get on the front line. Charles lays down casually, his head on the sergeant's legs. Next to them, Corporal Michaud is crafting some kind of guitar with a piece of wood and a German helmet.

"Jokes are the Per Ankh politics' cornerstone. If you don't know them, not only you are an ignorant, but you also can't understand its intricacies.

- Go on, I'm listening to you.

- So, it's the story of a Mazrui, a Bellini and a noble Kane who respond a government add...

- Wait, which are the Kanes again?

- You're not following Desjardins, I already told you, in addition you met Jabari Kane, your first day at Nome.

- You know, I saw so many people that day ...

- Well, again, a Mazrui, a Kane and a Bellini respond to a government add to do some kind of big construction job. The wealthy Mazrui, who knows his work is of good quality, offers the civil servant to do the work for thirty million dollars. The other asks him how he is going to distribute the money. 'There will be ten million for the workers, Mazrui tells him, ten million for the materials, and ten million for me who will do the work.'

- Yeah, a little expensive, but supposing.

- Shut up ! Then we call the Kane, and he says right away, 'I'll do the work for 60 million, that's 20 million for the labor force, 20 million for materials and 20 million for me'. But after comes the Bellini, who spied on the other two. He says to the official: 'Listen, I suggest you do the work for 90 million. 30 million for me, 30 million for you and we will give the remaining 30 million to Mazrui so that he can do the job '… you didn't understand the joke…

- The Bellini is Italian right? So he corrupts officials?

- Yes, we call it System B. And the Kane will always ask twice as much as the Mazrui and will always get half as much. Okay, come on, I'll tell you another one: Champollion, Setne and Alexandre Menshikov are walking into a Greek temple… "

At this moment he stops as he has just noticed the four men approaching. Jean greets them and introduces the others:

"Hector, my brother, another son of Zeus, and this is Eric, a descendant of Bellona. They are my best fighters. Oh, and this is John Cain, he's English.

- Hi guys, Charles tells them.

- We brought you some cheese, Hector offers them.

- Seriously? Well done !

- Camembert ! Michel's eyes shine in the dim light.

"Are you really going to eat it like this?" English shouts at them.

- Don't worry about Roastbeef, we stink more than it, Charles retorts. Keep half of it, sergeant, we'll bewitch it. "

They eat in silence for a while. Jean continues:

"We have a problem, we think that the Germans have a monster in reserve.

- And not just any, Chimera, Eric insisted.

- That's Greek, that doesn't concern us, Michel retorts.

- Yes, but it is you who will lead the assault. They have planned a charge, right?

- Sergeant? asks Charles.

- Admiting ? The other magician answers.

- They'll throw it at you. With the Mist you might see a tank but the result will be the same. You won't stand a chance.

- Listen, I think I can see what you want, but we won't be able to do anything, the Per Ankh…

- Damn your laws ! Do you want to see your soldiers drop like flies or what?

- You said it yourself, I have an assault to lead. I can't get out of my way to hunt monsters.

- We are taking care of it. What you have to do is cover us up, in case there are demigods on the other side, or wizards, or whatever. Let us have the field free. "

Michel thinks about it for a moment.

"Do you know where exactly it will be deployed?"

- Hill 321.

- This is where we're going, Charles reacts.

- You mean that we will be exactly in its axis?

- Possible, says Jean.

- I'm going to work it out, answers Michel. Maybe… maybe we can pull off a group movement.

- We will charge at your side then, Hector declares gravely. We should go to sleep. "

Back were we started: wait and count, one two, three. He doesn't sleep, he never sleeps, he still counts in his head, "It's time" : Leclerc comes to pick him up. In the cold silence of dawn, the battalion ascends to the first trench. They meet, ever in silence, dark and bloody men coming back from the battles of the day before. One, two, three, he continues to count the hours, and nothing counts anymore but this, the minutes, the numbers, his heart's frantic beating.

And then comes the moment, with its whistles and its orders. "Bayonets on the gun," he yells for his troops, and his cry echoes, repeated throughout the trench. "Ladders," he still screams at his lungs. And ladders are hoisted on the walls, as his heart beats to the rhythm of intensifying artillery salvos. The light above the earthen wall pierces his eyes, and all fearful gazes are turned upward, to this cold world of mud and meteorites. A soldier makes his sign of the cross, but they must go up now. One, two, three, the earth trembles, you must not miss the bars; outside the world awaits. And suddenly he's standing in the sun, his big rifle dangling beside him like a heavy stick. Charge, he remembers "Charge! ". And he runs under the bright sun, while the earth explodes all around, he runs suspended between life and death, on the thin tongue of brown earth.

They arrive at the opposing trench, finish off Fritz who have not yet fled in a great crash of steel. Someone hoists the French flag to signal the advance of the line. "Consolidate the position! Forward ! The sky is suddenly covered. The sun has disappeared, it begins to rain, the trench becomes a pool of mud. The persistent sound of the water is added to the howls, the shots, the machine guns, the whistles, the orders, the ever closer salvos of the artillery. French? German ? Impossible to know. Leclerc walks on a buried mine and explodes in the air. They bring ladders again because the Boches have dynamited the narrow corridor that leads to the secondary trenches. Once again, they are standing on the no man's land which is slipping out from under their feet.

Suddenly a terrible roar echoes in the din. Desjardins lifts his head: on the edge of the pit is placed Chimera, the body of a goat, the head of a lion, as in his illustrated children's books. And in his mouth, fire, a lot of fire. He would like to charge it, but a terrible cry rings out. From the opposing trench, the Fritz leads a contrary charge. "In position, rally". The soldiers flee from the monster, some return to the trenches. He has the reflex to throw himself to the ground, escapes a burst of hellfire.

"Charles!" He calls in the midst of the chaos. "Target the opposing magicians. Before knowing if he was heard, he joins the defence square. Some random Fritz aims at him in the head, he dodges, sticks his bayonet in his thigh, runs. Out of the corner of his eye he sees lights, as if lightnings were hitting the battlefield. Jean and his men attack Chimera. A hieroglyph bursts in front of him "how...". He just has time to decipher it, "Ha-di" and the world explodes again. "Watch out for shells! » Michaud says, helping him to get up, « they are firing at us »! Very funny. He is not sure how he escaped the hieroglyph. He looks around, his rifle is missing. They hear another salvo and Michaud runs off. Instead of running, like an idiot, he searches for his gun. A snake howl sounds, Desjardins didn't know that snakes could scream, but how else could he describe this shrill whistle? He looks around, there is hardly anyone left: Fritz has been pushed back once again, they are behind the front. Chimera lies, overturned. Phew! In front of her, three demigods, and a magician.

There is now something like deep breath, a moment of silence more terrible than the whistles. Hector is two steps ahead and walks towards Chimera. Suddenly he steps on a metalic object. "Don't take your foot off," Desjardins yells at him. Hector slowly turns towards him, and in his gaze there is that solemn gravity of the man who knows he is going to die. He withdraws his foot. The explosion knocks him to the ground again. By the time he gets up a great wave reaches them, the French soldiers running back towards them. And the most terrible words there are: "GAZ, GAZ!" Everyone is running, "Put on your masks!" ». But, as in an acoustic hole, in a hallucinated silence, motionless in the center of the crowd, Michel listens to the dull and light sound of the shells opening while the world turns yellow and green. In an endless second, he gazes at the beauty of the fog sheets, and who would have thought that death could be so beautiful?

At the last moment, he puts his hands over her mouth. "Air" he whispers, and his hieroglyph sparkles between the mists. He walks towards a trench, to whom? Which ? In front of him, at the bend of a dirt corridor in the labyrinth of mud and steel, a monstrous figure advances, brown uniform and full-on gas mask. They contemplate each other for a long time in this sepulchral face-to-face, infinitely hesitant. It is almost with regret that the other finally comes forward with his infernal insect's face. Michel takes out his knife, grabs the butt of his opponent's rifle that trembles in his insecure gloved hand. They fight for a few moments. Michel must seem a ghost to the other, without his mask, bare headed, in the middle of the trench gas. He sticks his knife at the junction of the mask and the uniform, in the neck, upwards. The two men drop next to each other. Sitting on the earthen wall, Michel rests his head on the German's shoulder, listens to the blood flowing from his head.

After a while, the artillery salvos became more distant, the rumor of the fighting subsided. He turns to his companion, removes his gas mask. He's a man of about thirty, brown hair, a birthmark on his cheek. He opens his uniform at chest level and finds a stained photograph. The man is standing there next to a young woman, holding a baby in her arms, a little girl in a baptismal dress clings to her mother's skirts. Michel contemplates it tenderly in the sunset light, then, impulsively, puts it away in his own uniform.

Daylight is replaced by a fiery glow. He finally gets up. Puts one foot on the other man's shoulder, then on his head, to climb the trench which is not very high. He crawls on the ground, gets up. Sees a man standing in the great vastness. "Charles", he recognizes him. He walks towards him, not worrying about the buried mines, or that slight dull rumble. He is just a few meters from him, when he sees what the other is looking at.

Within a large crater, a female lioness in a red tunic, and the fiery glow radiates from her, like a comet coming to strike the earth with divine retribution. Time is falling apart. "I'm sorry, I didn't want to… I had no choice…" Charles is hurt, he sees that. The goddess watches them move forward with her cold, distant eye. "Take a step back" whispers Michel. So Sekhmet smiles. She smiles and terror runs through each of his veins, and it seems to him that the stars themselves are smiling with that smile of a hungry carnivore. Sekhmet smiles and her smile radiates, and all the gases, shells, nightmares merge into this emanation of divine laughter.

From the depths of the ages returns a muffled roar of apocalypse. A plane, he understands, and above Sekhmet's aura, a German unit flies. They aren't that far from the nearest trench, you just have to run. But the world explodes as shells fall from the bottom of the sky, as the trenches ignite one by one in the night. The goddess sets forth. Michel grabs the arm of the other magician; he calls the earth. And the earth answers him. As they run the other way, the earth spins, reconfigures, envelopes them, and the ground disappears. And the cursed earth sucks up its little energy, the power it has left, worn out by months of forehead and anguish. He lets himself go to the movement of the earth, to the giant whirlpool which engulfs it, far from Sekhmet which roars towards the sky, and propels itself there with the force of a flaming arrow.

When he opens his eyes again he is lying on bodies. They have slipped into a pit. The earth is still shaking, but the aviation is moving away. Little by little silence falls. They are far away now, from the living, from the pain. He gets up, tries to go up the slope, but the earth slips under his feet, and he stumbles on a body. The corpses are like spades, thorns of mud. Here and there a bayonet sparkles. These are the deaths of three days ago, during the assault on an enemy trench. Obviously there is no enemy trench now, there is no more soil, just those holes, the mud, and that color of gray on brown. Ashes. He crawls up to the corporal.

"Oh, it's not a trench, it's a cemetery," Charles laughs. A red dot stains the blue of his uniform. He looks around. Michel crawls toward him. The other snuggles up in his arms.

"Say something, he whispers. "Dying in silence, it's difficult." Night is falling slowly. In the distance a forest is burning. Soon there will only be black on red, soon. "Michel, please". The air returns to him, the song of the Paris Commune, like a distant lullaby.

"When it comes to cherry time
And gay nightingales and mockingbirds
Shall all be celebrating ... "

Charles smiles softly, or perhaps he just dreamed of that sketch of appeasement, but encouraged, he continues in a confident voice:

"... When we sing the cherry season
The mockingbird will hiss much better.
But the cherry time, it is so very short… "

Fire; smoke! The stars glide across the sky behind the ash clouds. Charles's body is hot, his tunic wet, soon it'll all be gone but it's still hot. The bayonets erected are long obelisks sentinels in the moonbeams, soon the morning will be cold, but the earth still rumbles from time to time under the distant shells like the pulse of a giant body.

"... Cherries of love with similar dresses
Falling under the leaf in drops of blood… "

On the first morning, the world is a moon desert. The song ends its journey, somewhere between his mouth and the stars, carried by irons like antennae, dancing from star to star, from wound to wound, from crater to fissure.

"... For I who do not fear cruel punishment
I will not live without suffering one day… "

After two days, the world is gray, the sky gray. A terrible roar tears his ears, the sound of a meteor in the silence. It's an immense howl, an apocalypse trumpet. He opens his eyes and the world vibrates. If he could see himself, he would not see himself, for he is just one gray heap among others, a mountain of ash and dried blood. His mouth is only a long crack, which vibrates, vibrates under the infernal roar of life. He looks at the beetle on his hand. We must go now, he seems to tell him, the last beetle. It's time to go back up.

His hand gropes around his belt, where his gourd is miraculously intact. "Charles, my friend, my brother in arms, I'm sorry, really, but it's time to go, it's really time to go" and he gets up, and falls back, then gets up again. His feet barely support the weight of his body.

"... When you get to the cherry season
You will also have heartaches… "

In the pit, the corpses are eaten by flies. By sliding on a body, he gets his hands in a carnage of maggots. Then he sees with terror that his wounds on his arms are full of worms. "Where's my beetle? There are plenty of them", he realizes, they eat our bodies. He turns and faces an entire wall of beetles, eating the oldest corpses. One of them breaks off and flees to the sky. "It's him… Where is the way out?" He climbs fly nests and pieces of rotten flesh. Up there, the world is waiting over the trench. The scarab awaits him, lying on a stone. There's no more rotting up there, just the ashes and cleanliness of the dying fire. The scarab flies towards the sun to disappear there. He follows it.

"... I will always love cherry time
It is from this time that I keep in my heart
An open wound ... "

Alors il marche, dans le monde plat, lunaire et gris, gris, gris. Au loin, entre les fumerolles, une silhouette noire marche dans l'immensité en sa direction. Il ne sait même plus dans quelle direction il est parti, il suit juste le scarabée. Il croise le défunt, corps brûlé, organes pendants, marchant toujours. Sans un regard, le macchabé va s'enfuir, vers le royaume des morts, et Michel contemple longuement sa route en sens inverse. Puis il marche des heures durant, traverse une forêt calcinée. Mais dans le soir qui tombe, les incendies reprennent, et sous la lueur du feu, le monde n'est qu'une grande plaie rouge. Ses mains sont rouges, et le sol rouge, rouges les souches brûlées. Sa gourde est vide, sa bouche est rouge sans doute, et en feu.

So he walks, in this flat, lunar and gray, gray, gray world. In the distance, between fumaroles, a black silhouette walks in the immensity in his direction. He doesn't even know which way he's gone anymore, he's just following the beetle. He meets the deceased, body burned, organs hanging, still walking. Without a glance, the stiff flees away, to the kingdom of the dead, and Michel contemplates for a long time his road in the opposite direction. Then he walks for hours, crosses a charred forest. But as evening falls, the fires start again, and under the glow of the fire, the world is but a great red plague. His hands are red, and the ground red, red the burnt stumps. His gourd is empty, his mouth is no doubt red, and on fire.

"And Lady Fortune, being offered to me
Will never be able to close my pain… "

After this indefinite time he will find the linving's territory. "Who goes there? Who are you? Answer or I will shoot you! He remains standing, wobbling near the hole. Someone recognizes his tattered uniform.

« Frenchman! Get him down here. » On amène une échelle, des gens le soulèvent, le descendent.

« Someone, call the sergeant !

– Is he wounded?

– What's your regiment? Your military number?

– I can't read it on his form, the fabric is too damaged.

– Give him something to drink.

– We need your military number!

– He came from the South.

– No one's there anymore, not since the assault last week.

– Does anyone speak French in here?

– Name, number, regiment?

– Give him some air, let him breath for god's sake! ».

He watches them moving, as if he was drunk, the ringing back in his ears. A soldier ends up standing in front of him.

« Look, we need your military number, Numéro, you understand ? Look, here is mine, 33 32110, yours?

– Cent soixante-deux, dix-huit mille…

– Wait, wait, again, slower, encore…

– Un.

– One

– Six

– Six

– Deux

– Two

– Ask him what his regiment is.

– Fuck of Sean!

– That's his regiment number, call the sarg'

– Après?

– Un

– One

– Huit

– Eight

– Huit

– Eight

– Deux

– Two

– Cinq

– Five

– Just call the medic already. »

It's funny, he thinks, there are no English in Verdun. He begins to hum again, softly. The others look at him like a mad man. They lead him somewhere, he doesnt know, he doesn't know where.

The next day, at the hospital, he hears French for the first time. "He just cheated death." Says the english sergeant to the french lieutenant. "How do you call a man like that in your language, frog?

- Trompe-la-mort, answers the lieutenant with a smile. Well soldier, your story will no doubt rejoyce our troops."

"I will always love cherry time
And the memory that I keep in my heart."