The Red Collar by Jean-Christophe Rufin, Adriana Hunter Page A

our lines. People threw up flares. The artillery on our side reacted quickly and sprayed the Bulgarian trenches. I don’t need to draw you a diagram . . . ”
    â€œHow did you extricate yourselves?”
    â€œAfoninov and I were horrified. At first we held the boys back. But then things took a different turn. It was war again. Every man for himself. Someone gave the signal to attack. The Russians went over the top with me. The Bulgarians had prepared the mutiny carefully: They’d eliminated all the NCOs in the sector. Their lines were a complete shambles and we broke through them without any resistance. It was terrible. We were killing comrades who were just about to join us. A few minutes earlier we’d been prepared to fraternize but now we were in attack mode, we killed everyone we came across.”
    â€œAnd eventually you were injured?”
    â€œAfter an hour, or thereabouts. We’d broken through three lines of defense and our artillery hadn’t anticipated we’d advance that far. They started using heavy shells and I took some shrapnel in the back of my head. It wasn’t deep but it knocked me out. I woke up three days later in Salonika, in the hospital.”

C HAPTER VIII
    T hat’s how I became a hero.”
    To punctuate this conclusion, Morlac took a savage bite of his apple.
    â€œBecause of the dog, when it comes down to it,” suggested the major.
    The prisoner nodded as he chewed.
    â€œIs that why you hate Wilhelm?”
    â€œI don’t hate him anymore,” he said, spitting out a pip. “Okay, when I came round in the hospital, that was another story: When I realized what had happened I felt like killing him. As soon as I could get up I saw him down below, in the courtyard, waiting for me. And for nights on end, till the end of my convalescence, I tried to picture how I could get rid of him.”
    Morlac threw the core onto the table.
    â€œBut I couldn’t do it. First of all, I was stuck in bed. But mostly because I was a hero, you see? Officers had come to bring me my mention signed by Sarrail himself. When General Guillaumat took over from him, he visited the hospital and came into my ward with his staff to congratulate me. Everyone kept talking about my dog. They knew he’d been at the front with me. The nurses fed him in the yard and told me how he was doing. No one would have understood if I’d gotten rid of him with a pistol. But that was what I thought about day and night.”
    He sniggered as he talked, wearing the bitter expression that so irritated Lantier.
    â€œI spent the whole winter cooped up, being tended to. But with the first good weather, the doctors thought they were doing me a favor saying I could go out for walks. And those idiotic nurses brought Wilhelm to me to keep me company! They’d even clubbed together to buy him a smart collar. The only consolation I had for having to tolerate him was seeing his face on the end of a leash!”
    â€œBut he’s a dog, you can’t hold it against him . . . ”
    â€œThat’s what I ended up thinking. It took me nearly six months. It was high summer, I remember it like it was yesterday. We were sitting in the shade of an umbrella pine, him and me. I was looking at his neck, the skin was peeling because he’d been injured too in this whole thing, and it was taking a while to scar. And all of a sudden I felt kind of dizzy. It felt like everything was spinning around me. But it was all going on inside my head: Everything was suddenly falling into place. A massive shake-up in my mind.”
    He stood up and walked to the far end of the cell, then spun round fiercely.
    â€œ
He
was the hero. That’s what I thought, you see. Not just because he followed me to the front and was wounded. No, it was deeper than that, more radical. He had all the good qualities expected of soldiers. He was loyal to the death, brave, merciless toward his enemies.