Free Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline Page A

always such a big crowd ... Unless you's rather eat in my room ... ," She was being very considerate that evening.
    We finally decided on Duval's. But we'd hardly sat down when the place struck me as monstrous. I got the idea that these people sitting in rows around us were waiting for bullets to be fired at them from all sides while they were eating.
    "Get out!" I warned them. "Beat it! They're going to shoot! They're going to kill you! The whole lot of you!"
    I was hurried back to Lola's hotel! Everywhere I saw the same thing ... The people in the hallways of the Paritz all seemed to be on their way to be shot and so did the clerks behind the big desk, all of them just ripe for it, and the character down at the door with his uniform as blue as the sky and as golden as the sun, the doorman, and the officers and generals walking this way and that not nearly so gorgeous of course, but in uniform all the same, all ripe to be shot, there'd be shooting from every side, no one would escape, not this one, not that or the other. The time for joking was past ...
    "They're going to shoot!" I yelled at the top of my lungs in the middle of the lobby.
    "They're going to shoot! Beat it, all of you! ..." I went to the window and shouted some more. What a disturbance! "Poor soldier boy!" the people said. The concierge led me gently to the bar, by suasion. He gave me something to drink and I drank quite a lot, and then the M.P.'s came and took me away, not so gently. There'd been M.P.'s at the Gallery of the Nations, too. I'd seen them. Lola kissed me and helped them to take me away with their handcuffs.
    Then I fell sick, I was delirious, driven mad by fear, they said at the hospital. Maybe so. The best thing to do when you're in this world, don't you agree, is to get out of it. Crazy or not, scared or not.
    There was quite a commotion. Some people said: "That young fellow's an anarchist, they'll shoot him, the sooner the better ... Can't let the grass grow under our feet with a war on! ... But there were others, more patient, who thought I was just syphilitic and sincerely insane, they consequently wanted me to be locked up until the war was over or at least for several months, because they, who claimed to be sane and in their right minds, wanted to take care of me while they carried on the war all by themselves. Which proves that if you want people to think you're normal there's nothing like having an all-fired nerve. If you've got plenty of nerve, you're all set, because then you're entitled to do practically anything at all, you've got the majority on your side, and it's the majority who decide what's crazy and what isn't.
    Even so my diagnosis was very doubtful. So the authorities decided to put me under observation for a while. My little friend Lola had permission to visit me now and then, and so did my mother. That was all.
    We, the befogged wounded, were lodged in a secondary school at Issy-les-Moulineaux, especially rigged to take in soldiers like me, whose patriotism was either impaired or dangerously sick, and get us by cajolery or force to confess. The treatment wasn't really bad, but we felt we were being watched every minute of the day by the staff of silent male nurses endowed with enormous ears.
    After a varying period of observation, we'd be quietly sent away and assigned to an insane asylum, the front, or, not infrequently, the firing squad.
    Among the comrades assembled in that suspect institution, I always wondered while listening to them talking in whispers in the mess hall, which ones might be on the point of becoming ghosts.
    In her little cottage near the gate dwelt the concierge, who sold us barley sugar and oranges as well as the wherewithal for sewing on buttons. She also sold us pleasure. For noncoms the price of pleasure was ten francs. Everybody could have it. But watch your step, because men tend to get too confiding on such occasions. An expansive moment could cost you dearly. Whatever was confided to her she