The Red Collar by Jean-Christophe Rufin, Adriana Hunter

like a warm caress.
    â€œI’ve told you about 1916,” said Morlac, “the year I arrived on the eastern front. A year of pointless suffering. Failed offensives, and that winter coming in on top of everything else, freezing up in those mountains, and the bickering between all the different people who made up the Oriental Force. We could call them Allies ’til we were blue in the face, it didn’t fool anyone. They each had their own aims. With the English it was about the gateway to India. They did as little as possible in Salonika and, if we’d listened to them, we’d have sent everyone to Egypt. The Italians were only interested in Albania. The Greeks kept changing their minds, some wanted to support the Germans, and some were in favor of the Allies. Basically, it was a shambles at top-brass level. It was even worse for the troops. In winter we froze, and in summer there was malaria and our failing stomachs.”
    â€œDid you have any leave?”
    Morlac didn’t appear to like the question. He looked away.
    â€œNo. And I didn’t want any, anyway,” he said and then quickly changed the subject, going back to his account: “In ’17 things got going again with offensives in the north. I was in the eastern sector, in Macedonia. We were up against the Bulgarians. All we knew was Romania had caved in. We had no idea about anything else. The terrain was all gorges and strings of mountains, with ridges where they shot at us from. Our objective was the river Tcherna. But the enemy were well-fortified, and in the end we got dug in, too.”
    â€œIn fact, it must have been like in France: trenches and pillboxes.”
    â€œWaiting, mostly. And we were a long way from home. We didn’t get any mail. We went through these strange villages with white houses, they didn’t look like anything we’d ever known. You couldn’t trust anyone. No one liked us but, God knows, the locals made a song and dance when they saw us. You’d have thought we were the answer to all their prayers, every time. And then two days later we realized they were informing the enemy, and that’s when they weren’t slitting our throats themselves.”
    â€œWere there other Allied troops with you?”
    â€œI’m just coming to that.”
    Dujeux’s face was briefly framed in the small window in the door.
    â€œWe had the Annamites to our left. The poor things were freezing to death. They packed it in completely in those conditions. They turned grey and stopped moving. It was hard to get three words out of them.”
    â€œIt was the same in Argonne.”
    â€œMy friends told me to keep an eye on Wilhelm because they had a reputation for eating dogs. But he went to their sector two or three times and they didn’t do him any harm.”
    â€œA lot of exaggerating goes on about that. I never saw them eat dogs.”
    Morlac gave an evasive shrug. He wanted to get to the point.
    â€œTo our right were the Russians. They were so close that our lines met. If we walked along our trenches we came across theirs. They were a friendly bunch and they knew all about winter. They didn’t have much to eat but their supply corps always made sure they had something to drink. They made music in the evenings and Wilhelm often went over there. One time they even made him drink some vodka and everyone laughed when he came back because he couldn’t walk straight.”
    The sun had moved round and they shifted to the end of the bench to stay in the light.
    â€œI often went to look for him in the Russian sector, in fact I ended up getting to know quite a few of those boys. There was one, Afoninov, who spoke French and I liked talking with him. He was a regular soldier but he’d had an education. He was a typographer in Saint Petersburg. He’d had some trouble with the Tsar’s police, and had been sent to the front without anyone asking his