At night, black and red insects, cockroaches that were mating in the cavities of the vault fell sleepy, damp and cold on our lips I no longer screamed.
We rotted slowly on the mud of the cellar. We spoke like rats, we walked, we ate like rats. From the cellar where we had been confined for six years, the laughs, the shouts, the curses of the prisoners made us picture those solitary deaths and massacres. Prisoners on the second floor watched those washed-out cats and dogs die, lying down then struggling in the mud like birds caught in lime famished cats jumped on those with gaping wounds and tore them open. We could see nothing of the town except its smoke and its dying animals. At night we could hear their cries and death rattles. Our prison was encircled by marshland where birds and sick dogs came to die. For me the text is the matrix for Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats.” P.G.
It stands under the immediate impression of Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead, and is the result of a paraphrase of a very bleak text fragment from Johann Sebastian Bach’s St John Passion, which I sung as a child. “This text was written at the end of 1962, after my return from Algeria.
