by Richard Wake
I felt like crying. But Georges was wound up now and just spewing.
"He's such an odd little old man," he said. "I mean, what in the fuck are we doing out here? We had a nice normal headquarters building at Les Invalides, left bank, almost on the Seine, near everything. But no, we have to come out here, away from the politicians, away from everybody. Do you know he lives in there, in one of the buildings in the back? It's like a fucking jail cell. The man in charge of the French army lives in this dark fucking room -- I think he sleeps on a cot, all alone--"
"With only the Marne to keep him warm," Leon said.
It was every bad thing that I had imagined, only it might have been worse. Still, I just couldn't believe that they were so calcified that they wouldn't listen to reason.
"All right, forget Gamelin for a second," I said. "Tell me what you think. Do you think it's crazy that he won't listen at all? Do you think the Ardennes is impossible?"
"It would be hard," Georges said. "Everything I know about reading a map tells me that. But I have to be honest -- I've never been there. I've never seen it first-hand. All I know about the Ardennes is what people tell me -- narrow, winding roads, trees hugging the sides, no way to get a tank through."
"But have they checked?"
"Checked?" Georges said, his tone mocking the question. "Checked? Like, actually gotten off of their asses? Of course not. All they know is what they remember from a family vacation to the Ardennes when they were 11."
Georges's voice was suddenly drowned out by a half-dozen soldiers on motorcycles, roaring out of the chateau and down the street. He waited until they were gone, past the Metro entrance, headed to who knows where.
"See that?" he said. "You can set your watch by it. That is our modern, 20th Century communication system with the generals in the field."
"What? What are you talking about?"
"That's it," Georges said. "No radios. No teletypes. That's what we have -- messengers on motorbikes. And they aren't even good motorbikes. We are so fucked."
"What does Gamelin say when people your age ask about bringing in radios?"
"Not just people my age -- the old colonels and generals on the staff can't believe it, either. But Gamelin says, 'This is preferable.' He isn't big on giving orders. He's more of a guiding-principles kind of general. I think that's a mistake because I think the generals in the field -- well, a few of them -- are a bunch of fucking donkeys. But that's his style."
"Well, what about the date?" I said. "I mean, it's the day after tomorrow."
"I know. They know. Like I said, we're 'awaiting events.' And what we're waiting for is a German re-run of the last war, a sweep through Holland and Belgium. That's where our best troops are. And the Maginot Line, well, I really do think the Germans will stay away from that."
"And in-between?" I said. "What is guarding the Ardennes?"
"Some divisions. Some shitty divisions -- you know, Uncle Pierre and his buddies called up from the reserve, and a couple of canons pulled by horses."
"Armor?"
"Not there," Georges said. "Not really."
"Great place to attack, it seems to me."
"I'll bring this all up again at the next staff meeting." George looked at his watch. "In two hours. But nobody's really listening -- I have to be honest. I might be able to convince my boss to recommend that we move a few more battalions in that direction, but even if I do, they're all just Uncle Pierres -- the best troops will all be in Belgium.
"Let's just hope the Ardennes roads are as narrow as their vacation memories think they are," Georges said. "I mean, hope is all we fucking have at this point."
48
I spent the rest of Wednesday trying to convince myself that the trip hadn't been a total waste. Maybe one more plea at the French high command's staff meeting would move enough men, and move them quickly enough, to make a difference. If they could just slow the Germans down, it might matter. And as for the Nazi gold story, Leon was already in his dog-after-a-bone mode. He went to work after we got back from Vincennes and said he wouldn't have time to see me on Thursday.
So, maybe. My original plan was to take the night train back to Zurich on Thursday and get home Friday morning, the invasion day. But I changed to the morning train because, well, I just didn't feel like hanging around in Paris anymore. The morning train also took a more southerly route than the night train, and I figured the farther away from the Ardennes, the better.
I liked trains, but I didn't really like trains during the day. It seemed like a waste of time, where the night train was kind of fun and just more efficient. But, besides the route, I just wanted to get home and see Manon. As it turned out, though, an engine breakdown about an hour past Dijon left us stranded for 12 hours. I was glad I had taken a private compartment -- thank you, Bohemia Suisse -- where I could stretch out and sleep. The only upside was that the dining car and, more importantly, the bar car had fully provisioned themselves during the stop at Dijon. One of the porters told me that the railway company would have come rescued us in a lorry had it not been for that.
The passengers who filled the bar car for many of those 12 hours made for an ornery menagerie. I ended up spending a long stretch with a guy named Claude Montreaux, who worked for a company that sold threshing machines to farmers. I could care less about the machines, but enjoyed hearing about his life, which was not all that different from what my life had been in Vienna -- traveling a few days a month, tromping around farms, handholding farmers, hearing their complaints, trying to sell them on the latest, greatest model. And he had the best expense account story.
"Every four months, I put in for a new pair of shoes," he said. "On our expense forms, you have a line to write what the expense is for, another line to write the amount, and a third line to write 'explanation.' For the shoes, my explanation is always one word: cowshit."
"That's two words," I said.
"My story, my grammar," he said.
We eventually got around to talking about the war because, well, that's what you inevitably did, especially if you had been drinking. Claude had seen a London paper on his last trip up to Lille, and said, "Norway looks like a disaster."
I asked him if he had a sense of what was next, and he said, "I know this is lousy, but do you think there's any chance Hitler goes for England first before coming after us?"
"I don't know," I said, even though I was pretty sure I did.
"Yeah, I really don't think so, either," he said.
Claude said he had fought at Verdun and survived. "But I won't take any clients near there -- I just won't go back," he said. "We have three salesmen, and the territories are drawn with pretty straight lines on the map, except that one." He stopped, took a long sip of his whiskey.
"I'll never go back," he said. And then another long pull. "Thank God my two kids are girls."
That's how it was with everybody. Actual information was barely available, but everybody had a gut, and everybody's gut was telling them the worst. It was human nature, 25 years after the last war, to expect the Germans to pull the same shit again -- especially with Hitler. They hated the Kaiser, but Hitler scared the hell out of them -- and, to repeat, fear is a much more potent emotion than hatred. Besides, nobody suffered like the French did in the great war. Whole villages were wiped out, never to be rebuilt -- and not just a couple. A generation of women had no husbands, no children. It's no wonder they needed Uncle Pierre in the reserve units.
I can't imagine what it must have felt like, to be a Frenchman and to know that the fucking Germans were coming again, for the third time since 1870. Then again, Claude's fantasy of a hope that they might turn on England first said a lot. As did the quiet, punctuated only by his sighs, that we fell into after a while.
Once we were moving again, most of the passengers seemed to shift to neutral corners. I went back to my compartment for a quick sleep. I would say that two-thirds of the passengers got off with Claude in Lyon. The stop there was long enough for me to stretch
my legs in the station and buy a newspaper. It was early Friday morning, May 10th. There was nothing in the paper about an invasion.
Once we were moving again, headed toward Geneva, I finished the paper in my compartment and then walked down to the dining car for breakfast. There was only one other table occupied. The waiter was quick with a cup of coffee and a menu.
"Seems quiet," I said, looking around.
"Very," he said.
"Is this unusual?"
"Yes," he said. Then he leaned down. "But I was talking to a porter on another train while we were waiting on the platform in Lyon. He was on a run headed south, toward Limoges, and he said they were packed."
"Any reason why?"
"Rumors, I guess," he said.
In the absence of information, what else was there? Rumors. There wasn't much more to say. The waiter left me to put in my order. I don't remember if I ended up eating it or not.
Everything was slow. We sat forever in godforsaken places for no apparent reason. The stop in Geneva was supposed to be 15 minutes, but it lasted over an hour. The stop in Bern was supposed to be 5 minutes, but it lasted 30. Finally, the train limped into Zurich at about 2 p.m. A trip that should have taken 10 hours ended up taking nearly 24.
And in the station, in what was usually a quieter time between the morning and evening rush, a steady stream of people were coming in off of Bahnhofstrasse, striding with a purpose. The afternoon papers, the ones bannered with the headline that consisted of three enormous black words -- "Germany Invades France" -- were selling as quickly as the newsagent could untie the next bundle.
49
For the next couple of days, I barely slept. My job, it seemed, was to read everything I could, see everything I could, and report back to London with as many daily updates as possible. I didn't have much, honestly. Army units seemed to be moving about and repositioning themselves from south to north -- I could see that much from the train station. I attempted to read divisional insignia from the uniform patches of soldiers grabbing a quick smoke on the platform during their stops, and even though it seemed pretty meaningless, Gregory and I passed it along to London every night.
I still had not seen or heard from Manon since I arrived back from Paris. She wasn't at home, or at work, or at the cafe, or with Liesl. Nobody knew where she was. And while I was worried, and a little bit mad that she hadn't found a way to leave behind some kind of message, I wasn't that worried. She was undoubtedly doing the same thing I was doing.
Still, I missed her, which fouled my mood even more than the daily updates in the newspapers. Because the story they told was the story that Fritz Ritter and the others had predicted. The invasion came on the 10th, as they had said. The attack went through the Ardennes, as they had said. Gamelin, the British, all of them had the roadmap -- but they all had crumpled it up and thrown it in the fire as if it were nothing more than kindling. And now the idiots were paying.
Three days in, the Germans were at the Meuse. If they managed to get across, they would take Sedan. And if they took Sedan, the entire country of France would have a collective nervous breakdown. In 1870, Sedan was the critical battle of the Franco-Prussian War, the decisive battle, and a thorough humiliation for France. This would be worse. Back then, France was forced to hand over Alsace and Lorraine to the Prussians, which was terrible but, well, it was only Alsace and Lorraine -- and besides, they got them back after the next war. Nobody who thought about it for even 30 seconds figured that Hitler would be willing to settle for a couple of provinces this time. And if he got Sedan, the road to Paris would be wide open.
By that third day, the Swiss were starting to panic -- not so much in Zurich, but more up near the French and German borders. I took a car ride and ran into paralyzing traffic from up there, all of it headed south. At one point, I was driving north with ease as the other side was jammed and not moving. Then a policeman blocked my path, waving two small white flags. He shuttled me off onto a side road.
"What do I do now?" I asked him, and he offered some very fast directions to Basel by taking secondary roads. He rattled them off too quickly to memorize.
"What's this about?" I said.
"We're turning this road into a one-way headed south," he said. "It's our only chance to clear this mess."
It was dark by the time I got back to Zurich. The streets were deserted. It was kind of like Vienna was in the days before the Anschluss, people burrowing in and saving their money before whatever was about to happen. I still didn't think the Germans would swallow Switzerland as long as the banks continued to play along, but who knew anymore.
I ate dinner at Fessler's. It was deserted. I saw Henry and Liesl and the baby for a minute, but they seemed intent on nesting in their flat, maybe even more intent than parents typically are, because of the war. They weren't in the cafe for five minutes. Gregory sat with me while I ate, and I told him what I had seen, and we composed the message for London. We did it right there at the table, and then he went upstairs to work out the code from the bible.
"What if they get Sedan?" Gregory said after we had received the confirmation back from Groucho.
"If Sedan falls, France falls."
"Look at a map -- it's a straight shot to Paris. And if the papers are right, the best French divisions are up in Belgium. So are the British."
"Maybe they can get it turned around."
"I don't know," I said. "It doesn't seem like these people react very quickly to anything."
"They have to wake up soon," Gregory said. "I mean, really. Don't they?"
Walking home, I kept thinking about what Gregory had said, and how he had always maintained more optimism than I had, despite how let down we had been. Yes, he was right. Yes, they did have to wake up -- and they probably would. Faced with a crisis, their eyes would be opened. France still had a big, fearsome army. The British would be some help, and they still had time here. The Germans were moving fast, but could they keep it up? Could their supplies keep up with their tanks?
There was still hope. I had actually talked myself into feeling pretty good, or at least better than I had been feeling, and then I opened the door and saw that Manon was there. We devoured each other, just about without words. Then we traded information, although neither of us knew much more than that the roads headed south were jammed. She didn't know anything more about Sedan than what was in the papers. But she agreed that it was the key to the whole thing. And she was more clinical in her assessment than I was.
"It might be too late for them to react," she said. "Idiots."
"Too late? It can't be. It's only been a couple of days."
"We'll know soon," she said. "Might not take long at all."
My hope had deflated again, and as I approached the confluence of despair and exhaustion, I fell asleep entwined with Manon. We were awakened a couple of hours later by a phone call from Liesl. I dropped the receiver in the dark and made her repeat what she had said because it had shocked me so. But the message was the same the second time as it had been the first time. Gregory had been shot in the cafe. He was dead.
50
The scene at the cafe was every bit as bad as I imagined it would be. Manon and I rushed over and found the police cars outside, jamming the narrow street, their lights flashing red and blue. Gregory's body had been removed by the coroner, but a puddle of blood remained as evidence of the spot. It was already drying, congealing on the wood floor.
Liesl was a rock, as was little Sylvie, wrapped tight in her mother's arms. Henry was catatonic. The three of them sat in a booth off to the side as the police detectives went about their business. We joined them, and I instinctively hugged Henry and didn't let go. But it was like I was embracing a lifeless form. He barely reacted to questions, or to a squeeze of his shoulder.
The drawer of the cash register was open and empty. A detective came over -- I didn't catch his name -- and said, "The lock on the door was forced, maybe with a crowbar. The till was empty. It appears, based on that alone, t
o have been a robbery that went horribly wrong. But what we don't get is why anyone would think there was a lot of money in the register at a place like this. Would there be?"
Henry didn't react to the question. I nudged him and said, "Henry," in almost a whisper, and he stirred as if from sleep.
"No, not much money," he said. "Nothing worth killing over."
"Was your father the kind of person who would resist an armed robber over a few francs?"
Henry shrugged, then fell back into his trance. But the cop was asking the right question. You never know how you're going to react in a given situation, but there is no way in hell that the Gregory I knew would have risked his life over that amount of money. Maybe back in the day, back in Vienna, when he had a crew to back him up and a reputation to uphold. But not here, not now, no, not at his age, not with little Sylvie there. It just didn't make any sense.
Which, of course, left...
I just couldn't entertain the thought. My mind literally could not process the possibility that this was somehow related to the radio in his spare room, and so it vanished from my consciousness before the thought even registered. The mind can be a fantastic organ sometimes, and it was for me that night, at least until Peter Ruchti walked into the cafe and began talking to a couple of the detectives who were still puzzling over the cash register and stepping daintily around the pool of drying blood.
Manon recognized Ruchti immediately and gave me a quizzical look across the table. I had not told her about Gregory because that was our deal -- we would share information but not sources or co-workers. It was just safer for everybody that way. But then, after this, I didn't know what I was going to do. I did know that I needed to talk to Ruchti, so I got up from the booth and announced to no one and everyone, "I need a breath of air," and walked out onto Oberdorfstrasse.
As I walked across the cafe, I looked at the window, my eyes having been caught by a blue-and-red flashing light. Across the street and a little bit down the street, a man stood in the shadow of a doorway. But he was lit, red and blue, with each cycle of the police car's light. He was lit just a little, though, and the colors distorted the picture, and I was a decent distance from the window, but the man standing in the doorway looked very much like Anders, the security guard at Bohemia Suisse.