Michel la Honte

A long time ago I was drafted in the French Army and sent to a rather inhospitable place in North Africa.
Our base was located on a mountainous peak overlooking a valley, and it was very hot in the summer and extremely cold in the winter.

Every two months a fresh batch of recruits would join us, and servicemen who had done their mandatory 28 months tour of duty would leave the base and go home.
The arrival of new recruits was always a big event that would break the monotony of our daily lives and make us temporarily forget the inherent danger of our situation.

One day a new batch arrived at our camp and one fellow immediately caught our attention. He was a Parisian like me and was doing a perfect imitation of a then famous French comedian named Darry Cowl.

Darry Cowl’s main shtick was his well-honed stuttering, and the new recruit whose name was Michel did a perfect imitation
He spoke with a superb stutter and kept us in stitches for hours.

At the end of the day though, some guys got tired of his shtick and asked him to stop. But Michel couldn’t put an end to it; we discovered that it was his natural way of speaking.
After realizing this, many people started picking on him and hazed him mercilessly.

But Michel was used to it and took it good-naturedly.

He was originally from a neighborhood called “Les Batignolles” and constantly referred to it just like Americans would refer to Brooklyn.
After a while everybody started calling him “Michel des Batignolles”.

Michel also had a favorite expression. When something upset him, he would loudly exclaim “la honte!” (the shame!). So after a while everybody started addressing him as “Michel la Honte” (Michel the Shame).

When we were not trudging in the field, we were staying in some ugly barracks covered with corrugated iron.
This kept us very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter.

I was bunking by the door and very often people would forget to close the door after entering or leaving the shack.
Everybody would then yell “the door, the door!”

Michel was not any better than the others and he often left the door open behind himself.

One day, exasperated by what I saw as callous negligence, I told Michel:
-If you leave the door open one more time, I swear, I will shoot you!
He laughed it up.

Knowing that this would happen again, I prepared for it.

I grabbed a pistol and a single cartridge.
I extracted the bullet from the cartridge and replaced it with a small paper pellet.
I then introduced the cartridge in the pistol’s chamber and waited.

As expected, Michel soon entered the room and left the door open behind him.
I screamed “the door!” to which Michel answered by an expletive.

I said, “you asked for it”, pointed the pistol at him and fired.

There was a loud noise but of course no bullet left the chamber.
Michel remained stunned and totally speechless for at least a minute.
You son of a bitch, he finally managed to say. You could have killed me. I felt the bullet whizzing by…

I just laughed and told him that I had removed the bullet from the cartridge before firing.

He was not convinced and swore that he heard the bullet whizzing by.
He then challenged me to a fight behind the barracks in late afternoon.

I couldn’t decently refuse.
I went there but La Honte never showed up.

I later apologized to him and we made up. We even managed to become friends.

In retrospective, I should never have played such a stupid prank, but as I now often say “when you are in your twenties, half of you brain is still missing”.

Alain