The Conspiracy by Paul Nizan

few midnight passes, which do not prevent you from relapsing into the nightmares that barracks and prisons manufacture all night long. Simon was really proud of himself on the day when he simulated a hepatic attack so well that the regimental doctor sent him to spend three weeks in the confined atmosphere of the fever wards and classic grey monastery gardens of the Val-de-Grâce. Among his chance companions, he really liked only the absent without leave, the deserters, those whose Army file bore the fine black-and-red arabesques of punishments for habitual misconduct, the insolent soldiers whose unauthorized absences expired an hour before becoming desertion. Anything seemed to him better than this blind servitude, this feverish barrack-room brooding: hospital, prison, suicide. Nothing discomfits the military authorities more than suicide, whereby a man craftily escapes all the Army’s supernatural threats. But nothing seemed more natural to Simon, who as long as he lived would see as the most heartrending symbol of order, and the noblest image of courage, the plain wooden coffin of a peasant from the Vendée who had hanged himself one night with his tie, after sixty hours’ confinement to barracks, from the banister on the top landing of the stairs in C Block: the officers were dreadfully put out, the men prowled about in front of the open door to the showers which were serving as a mortuary, the colonel’s staff captain recalled the time when a forceful colonel would make all his men march past a swine of a suicide’s corpse, exposed on the stable dungheap.
    As he had hoped, at the Port-Royal barracks Simon found a few freedoms. In this barracks, an astonishing, easygoing disorder reigned, maintained by the to-ings and fro-ings of colonial arrivals and departures, which allowed many prisoners to escape. Those on secondment like Simon, since the sentries scarcely knew them, used to enter and leave their quarters without anyone dreaming of asking them to account for themselves.
    The offices of Area 2 of the Paris Garrison were installed on the first floor of a main building facing onto Rue de Lourcine: it was an isolated refuge, where two secretaries lived – Simon and a private named Dietrich, whom he saw only rarely. Each morning, a company sergeant-major would come and smoke a cigarette in the office. Two or three times a week, a major would pay a brief visit to the men under his command, whose names he had forgotten, although he knew vaguely that one of them had been a student and had been recommended by the high command of the colonial regiments.
    Sergeant-Major Giudici, while awaiting his retirement, which would come soon what with his years of campaigning and his semi-campaigns at sea between Indochina and Marseilles, carried on an existence rich in complicated intrigues, centred upon a number of whores from Rue Pascal and the Carrefour des Gobelins.
    He liked Simon, because he thought he could rely more upon men who had a mysterious education, and whose unknown concerns and civilian world were no doubt too far distant from his own for them to take a notion to intervene dangerously in his affairs: he did not imagine that a young bourgeois could ever become a rival, or a spy.
    The discretionary power of military command, the baseness that habitually attaches itself to the sovereign exercise of absolute power, and the certainty of always being believed before an inferior, generally induce NCOs to look upon their men as servants and to force them into waiting upon their persons: the relationship of subordination which discipline establishes with a view to war turns in peacetime into a relationship of servility. A barracks is scarcely anything but a great assemblage of employers and servants – no feature of military life is more feudal than this. A strange game of social compensation and revenge takes place: a sergeant, who in civilian life has been unable to achieve anything, avenges himself