One of us has killed another of us. There has been an awful accident. I was not there. No one was there except the senior military doctor, Joël, his friend and fellow army officer, Jackie, and David, Kerguelen's shepherd. They were staying alone on Ile Haute, a mountainous island across the gulf from the main base, where there is a simple wooden cabin.
The death occurred on a weekend expedition to cull moufflons, the wild, sheeplike goats introduced here and multiplying. On Saturday night there had been a heavy snowfall across Kerguelen. I experienced this myself on a different expedition, on the main island, some 30 miles to the east. By Sunday morning the snow was deep everywhere and uncommonly deep on Ile Haute.
What follows is my understanding of Joël's report of the accident, to which the only other living witness is David. My French is still poor and this is not an authoritative account: I may have missed or misunderstood something; but not the gist.
Not long after first light on Sunday, the hunting party in the cabin saw moufflons standing quite close outside. These shy animals have acute hearing and the proximity was unusual. Jackie, the most experienced hunter of the trio, crept out, the others following. Guns were in a store to one side of the cabin. Jackie had grabbed David's and was soon loaded and in place, taking aim from a position fairly close to the cabin.
Joël was next to fetch his gun, moments later. He moved to join Jackie, his gun loaded and the safety-catch off, ready to shoot. This was Jackie's wish, Joël says: moufflons can hear the slightest click and Jackie required absolute silence, but he kept the gun pointing down.
Then he slipped in the snow. Joël cannot remember squeezing the trigger. For a split second after the report he was unsure from whose gun it had come. He had fallen backwards, involuntarily raising the barrel of the gun as he fell, and he must have triggered the weapon while trying to save himself.
With a cry of "my back!" Jackie collapsed. Joël leapt to him but he was lifeless within seconds. I have been told the femoral artery was severed, causing an immediate, massive haemorrhage. Joël, a doctor, did what he could and (it is said) stayed with the body for a very long time, trying to resuscitate Jackie.
But Jackie was dead. He leaves a widow in France, and children. It was Father's Day.
There are no telephones on the island of Kerguelen, a French possession in the Indian Ocean. Communication is by walkie-talkie on a frequency to which all sets are tuned. There are no roads, no paths, no aeroplanes and no helicopters. The fastest and easiest means of travel is by boat but, apart from inflatable Zodiacs, we have only two: a 19ft flat-bottomed barge far use within the gulf and a tiny but ocean-going research vessel, La Curieuse, 25 metres in length, which at that
moment was not far away.
David contacted the captain with the simple request to get to the island as fast as possible. Some time later La Curieuse arrived, the captain coming ashore by Zodiac. It took longer for Kerguelen's District Chief to get to Ile Haute in the barge. Communication by radio had been terse, "come at once" being the call. Back at the base at Port-aux-Français they did not yet know what had happened.
The barge returned there with the body. All at Port-aux-Français - perhaps 40 people - were called together. Joël addressed them himself, giving his account of what had happened. Sympathy for him was as immediate as grief for Jackie. The body was laid in the chapel just outside the base and many went to pay their respects. It is said Joël stayed in the chapel with the body for a long time.
I was not at the base. Those who were tell me that the atmosphere for the days immediately after was so dreadful that some remember the time as the worst of their lives. It scarred. I and my two companions, who were half a day's journey away on the east coast, knew only that the normally courteous radio-operator seemed brusque. We had no idea why. He was one of Jackie's best friends.
On Wednesday we returned from our expedition by tractor. In a little frozen, stony desert en route we were met by a party from the base. Standing in a cold wind we drank the hot wine they had brought, as the junior doctor, John, close to tears, told us everything.
There was some suggestion that Joël might have to return quickly, perhaps by warship, to the French island of La Réunion, a long voyage away. Joël, however, wished to stay until he could he relieved at the start of August. John, doing his French military service, not yet 30 and reluctant to carry on alone, supported his senior.
And that is still how things stand. Joël will leave, with me, for the ten-day journey to the island of Réunion, on the French Government vessel which arrives here in a fortnight and leaves at the start of next month. He will presumably face questioning when he arrives.
The shooting happened at the end of May. This is the first I have written of it. The feeling here was (I think) strong that mere words could only make things worse. Nobody tried to tell me how to handle it. The chief here said he did not wish to gag me; nothing has been hushed up, and I must decide for myself what, if anything, to write.
At that time any one of the 56 people on Kerguelen could have sold a breathless account to the French press. Nobody did and I decided that to play the door-stepping reporter was incompatible with the comradeship I have found here.
The only independent witness, David the shepherd, seemed shocked and depressed, and in the days which followed the accident the appearance of a camera, a microphone or a notebook would have jarred horribly. Anyway, in the end one just has to judge. I did, and stopped filming for a week and wrote only for myself.
This was out of respect for the living; my fellow hivernants. Feigned emotion devalues real feeling and I don't pretend to any sense of great personal loss, for I hardly knew Jackie. But all who did loved him; he was one of the most popular and respected people on the base. His life being over, the sorrow one feels now is for his wife and children, for the commonality here, and for poor Joël.
It has become appropriate, I think, now the episode is no longer current, to write about it.
And in the event I am glad of the six weeks' delay, for, as I look back now, the shooting seems to me the least interesting element in the story. The shooting was an accident. Guns arouse more attention than cars as instruments of accidental death, and the backdrop of a lonely, snowy and inaccessible island in the sub-Antarctic two thousand miles from anywhere adds theatricality to the story. But it is a false theatricality. People do kill each other by mistake, everywhere, all the time.
Jackie is gone.
The aftermath is still with us, though, and alive. Some lessons of the weeks since have astonished me, and there is space here to suggest the first: the impossibility of community journalism.
Short of Russia's Mir space station, the 56 winterers on Kerguelen are about as sharply defined a community as it is possible to imagine. We all live in one place and depend on each other. Before explaining why no journalist who is part of such a community could give it proper scrutiny, I must say plainly that I don't in this case believe that scrutiny would yield much more than we already know. It really was an accident and any lessons to be learnt leap, uncoaxed, from the bare
account.
But were this otherwise, and you thought that the journalist best placed to prise out the truth and the uncomfortable lessons would be me, you would he wrong. Boy, oh boy, Lady Thatcher, there is such a thing as society. I'm part of this little society; I'm on their side; we need guns to do our work; we like Joël enormously; we can all imagine it happening to us; we can see he has suffered enough; we accept the need for due process but inwardly wonder what a
police officer in La Réunion or court in France could tell us that we don't already know. We just want to put this whole dreadful episode behind us. We don't really think we need the formal machinery of law here at all. Consensus is strong. Our sense of community guards and protects us.
A good journalist has to kick all that in. He must stamp on fingers, ignore sensitivities, trample on the delicacies, betray confidences and upset the furniture in his hunt for a story, relieved he does not have to live with the consequences.
Mostly, as here, there will turn out to be no story. But once in a while there will be; and that once in a while, and the nagging fear, in the back of the mind of anyone tempted to complacency, that the once in a while has come, is worth any amount of "community" furniture upset in vain.
A good journalist is suspicious of community. Community crushes and silences. Community makes the one responsible to the many. Responsibility is an enemy of truth. A good journalist is irresponsible. I am not a good journalist.
