Monsieur le Commandant

by Romain Slocombe

  The memory of that rut burned more strongly – a hundred, a thousand times more strongly – than all those flimsy recollections of love that grow confused and vanish forever into the abyss of time.

  The weather outside looked cold and damp, and the breakfast dragged on. Unable to tear my mind from my nocturnal delights and the feelings they continued to elicit, I took inspiration from a reference to the fetching uniform that Ilse had worn yesterday – now replaced by a diaphanous negligee that only excited me more – to direct the conversation to those charitable young women whom I had known in Vittel in 1918.

  The bourgeois ladies of the resort and those who had come for the cure – mostly the forlorn wives of officers at the front – were a constant presence at the military hospital. They were well aware that men, even those condemned to idleness, and perhaps even more so under such circumstances, have physical needs. These Frenchwomen were thus intent on consoling their fallen warriors, bedridden or hobbling on crutches, and I cited the case of one Mademoiselle de T., most likely a virgin, whose fiancé had been killed in the earliest days of the war. This rather ugly twenty-five-year-old client of the spa came regularly to the hospital, seeking out the bedsides of all without exception – even those with the most hideous facial disfigurations – and had soon earned a nickname among the patients that was so vulgar I avoided repeating it. Settled into a chair at the side of a convalescent or disabled veteran, her gaze fixed on the wall, in her sweet voice she whispered Christian words of trust and hope, while beneath the sheets her right hand …

  Ilse blushed furiously, reminding me that Hermione was with us at the table. I shrugged my shoulders. What could a five-year-old understand about this tale of a hand? Her mother made a face. ‘Even so …’ I laughed and changed the subject.

  Over the following days I devoted myself more assiduously to my granddaughter, who eventually rewarded my efforts with greater affection. Hermione had a lot of Husson in her, and of her mother, who was generally kind and happy. As to her faults, they could only come from those eastern Jews the Wolffsohns or the Leesers, and I strove to cure her of the defects of her race – pride, slothfulness, frivolity – and to nurture all that was best in her to maturity. Was I doing her a service, even supposing that I could succeed? I believed I could, and I considered the task to be a duty.

  At the close of their all-too-brief visit, during the ritual goodbyes on the platform of Andigny station, I hugged Ilse – who had resumed the blue veil and long cape – holding her against me a few seconds longer than usual. My heart was beating fast; could she feel it? My little nurse extricated herself from my embrace. ‘Come back soon,’ I begged, turning to whisper breathlessly, ‘Promise, Hermione?’ The child nodded; Ilse took her by the hand and climbed onto the train without responding. I watched the red tail lights of the train recede down the tracks until they vanished into the dark night.

  My son had left for the front in early September and had not yet been given leave for Paris. I calculated that my Jewish daughter-in-law had not enjoyed the carnal act in two months.

  9.

  It is 8.30 a.m. Unable to sleep, I rose and began to write to you before dawn, and my wrist is numb from the work. The maid has just brought me my coffee. I have asked her not to disturb me before lunch.

  She is one of our sturdy peasant women from the Bocage, speaking with their typical slow drawl. Her husband works at the glassworks. Unbeknown to her, this decent woman was the inspiration for Marie-Thérèse in my Monsieur de Saintonge. I slept with girls of her type in my youth. I liked their candid laughter, their cheeks browned in the open air, their broad hips, their heavy, sweet-smelling breasts, their skilful hands and wrists, trained at work in our Norman dairies. I’ve sown quite a few bastards in the countryside; they are adults by now, most of them men, and out at work by this time of day. They rise at six, have their breakfast of soup, buttered bread and cider. In the summer, they work eleven hours in the fields without a break. My blood flows in their veins, and their sweat waters the soil.

  Before I finish this letter, Monsieur le Commandant, I will have to return to the subject of these boys – or rather, one of them in particular.

  God help me.

  As the Maréchal explained, the French will see all their strength restored, like the giant in the fable, when their feet are once again firmly planted in the soil. For the peasant is able to live on hope:

  In the fields, nothing can be taken for granted. Work in itself is not enough. One must still protect the fruits of the earth from the fickleness of the weather: frost, flood, hail, drought. The city-dweller can live from day to day. The cultivator must predict, calculate, struggle. Disappointments have no hold on such a man, who is guided by an instinct for the necessary labour and a passion for the soil. Whatever may come, he faces it, holds firm, and masters it.

  France – a hardworking, thrifty and freedom-loving nation – was born of such everyday miracles. The peasant built her with his heroic patience. It is he who maintains her economic and spiritual equilibrium. The prodigious advances in our material strength have yet to tap the source of our moral strength, which is etched all the more indelibly on the heart of the peasant because he draws it from the very soil of the Homeland.4

  The earth does not lie. It is our undying resource. It is the Homeland itself.

  In giving his attention to its destiny, the Maréchal sees, in its resurgence or its decline, the very reflection of our national destiny.

  Shortly after my little family had left, I received my first military postcard from Olivier, a scrap of blue cardboard sent from ‘Postal Sector No. 165’. The printed heading read: ‘This card must contain no indication of location, no description of military activity, and no name of a ranking officer.’ My son wrote neither about Ilse, nor about the child, nor about his own situation; he sent trite get-well wishes to his dear little mother; spoke – God knows why – about Napoleon; and signed off with the comical ‘Your sans-culotte’. At the hospice, I read the card to Marguerite, who nodded her head in silence, though I could not be certain that she understood. As the weather was fine, the ward sister allowed me to take my wife for a walk in the wheelchair, bundled up in furs over her nightgown. We strolled along the river. As we approached Quai de Verdun, I worried that the sight of our outer wall, the gables, chimneys and half-timbers of our villa – the largest and most handsome along this stretch of the Seine – might provoke some sort of crisis in Marguerite, or an overwhelming desire for home. But nothing of the sort occurred. I pushed the wheelchair slowly along to the very last pontoon, then turned round. On a Belgian barge that was passing by, a young blonde, her checked dress flapping around her bare legs, was hanging the washing out to dry. Although I was hardly able to distinguish her features at that distance, she, too, somehow reminded me of Ilse, whom I saw everywhere, here or on the streets of the capital, and whose image I was unable to shake from my thoughts.

  After a political meeting with men who shared my convictions (our campaign for the return to leadership of Maréchal Pétain, who was Ambassador to Madrid at that time, was in full swing), and a reception at Academy headquarters in late November, I invited Jacqueline Delubac to dinner at the Ritz. I craved, body and soul, the distraction of a woman of quality, as I felt that I would go out of my mind if I allowed my obsession to torment me a moment longer. The maître d’hôtel at the Ritz – an old beanpole who somehow managed to be obsequious and imperious at the same time, who bore the same Christian name as my son, and who was able at a glance to tell a real duke from an impostor, a millionaire from a swindler – sat us at the most fashionable and sought-after table in the place, to the left of the wide hallway that leads to the main dining room. Our neighbours were Noël Coward, dining with a group of RAF officers; Paul-Louis Weiller in dress uniform; Jean Cocteau a little further off, looking sadly hang-dog and ignored by the waiter; and Léon-Paul Fargue, who gave us a cordial wave. I made my guest laugh by telling her how, a week earlier as I lunched with the Goncour
t jury members at Drouant, her former ‘magnificent, noble lion’ Sacha had greeted Lucien Descaves with an ironic ‘Look who it is!’ Decidedly, the war could not be so terrible if even the cowards were back in town, and if we, naïve as we were, still believed (or rather, had decided to believe) in the myth of the blockade and the state of siege that would put an end to Hitler.

  I accompanied my exquisite companion to her home and then, on an irresistible impulse, headed for Rue Richer. I parked the car on a dark corner and turned off all the lights. I sat for hours, staring into the night and fighting off sleep. A taxi pulled up towards 1 a.m., and out stepped a nurse in a dark veil and cape. I watched in rigid silence as my daughter-in-law paid the driver and vanished into the courtyard.

  I drove straight through the night to Andigny without stopping.

  With its soldiers left waiting behind the Maginot Line, my country was waging a pathetic, timorous war, and I couldn’t have cared less. Women, too, had become a matter of indifference to me – all but one.

  I was madly in love with a Jewess, and this horrendous love was untenable.

  I decided to cut myself off from the world and to throw myself wholeheartedly, drawing on every last intellectual resource, into the new book that Bernard Grasset had been pressing me for.

  This was La Grappe mystique.

  I continue to believe that this book, which enjoyed enormous popularity, is the successful synthesis not only of the vagaries of History, but also of the vagaries of my soul and my thought. It ends in a somehow triumphant quietude that is also a sacrifice, though one that can be seen as glorious and selfless. In its prophetic message, it hints at a world neither you nor I will live to see.

  On the December morning when I finished it, after a sleepless night spent chained to my desk, the telephone rang. It was the Saint-Jacques hospice.

  My wife had just died.

  10.

  If you remain in the area much longer, Monsieur le Commandant, as I hope you will – where, for a start, will I find a better chess partner? – and your superiors do not send you back to Russia, I will teach you some of the local dialect.

  Those glowing bands that furrow the eastern sky just before sunrise – I saw them again this morning – are called bars of daylight. Those little blue clouds that stand out against the blue of the sky are jay wings (what you call Häher or Holzschreier). A whirlwind is called a folly. The weather is fattening or slimming, depending on whether there’s a threat of rain or the sky is clearing. In the same circumstances, you can also say that the weather is grieving or that the sun is laughing.

  When the soil turns easily, we say it’s obedient. When a wall or a building is in disrepair, it’s going mad. Trees can either be virtuous, that is, vigorous; stunned, stunted or withered; or furious when they grow too fast. Very often, they are seen to be ailering, or suffering. A good belt of woodland is said to be bawdy because it is bold and strapping. Plants that flower magnificently are sometimes called prideful, or cheeky. The rapid growth of vegetation in the month of May is compared to boiling liquid: the woods burl; the explosive growth of the hedgerows is a burling.

  The spring of 1940 was wonderfully early and beautiful. Was it the same on your side of the Rhine? I don’t recall. Here in Normandy and all across France, the sun laughed and our parched hedges did little burling compared to previous years, while without Marguerite to keep it up, the garden slowly died under my exhausted gaze. Day after day, neither bars nor jay wings streaked or speckled the absurdly blue sky, although the thunder of weapons began suddenly to rumble to the north, and later to the east. It had been so hot and dry that the rivers had been reduced to trickles and the fish died belly up in the lukewarm waters of the channels alongside our islands, which could be reached practically without the use of a boat. Such weather greatly favoured your lightning war.

  You know more about the breakthrough at Sedan than I do, so I won’t bother going over it. Split into two sharp prongs, ten German armoured and six motorised divisions sped westward along a road that our command had deemed unworthy of defending. Seven of those ten Panzer divisions crossed the Ardennes and reached the Meuse in three days. Having so poorly defended the sector, General Corap was stripped of his command and replaced by Giraud, who was captured along with his entire general staff. On 20 May, General Von Kleist’s tank corps reached the mouth of the Somme in an almost unimaginable burst of speed, attacking our troops in Belgium from the rear. I listened to this awful news on the wireless. I was humiliated by the collapse, which had, of course, been predictable, but like a few others I had come to hope for a brief and apocalyptic campaign for France that, in bringing Marianne to her festering knees, would lay the foundations for a National Rebirth with the long-awaited return of the Victor of Verdun.

  Maréchal Pétain, recalled from Spain in mid-May, was appointed Vice-President by Paul Reynaud, and Weygand replaced Gamelin as Supreme Commander. Wladimir d’Ormesson wrote in Le Matin: ‘The Pétain–Weygand partnership exudes a sense of immense calm. Their names represent such a wealth of experience, wisdom, knowledge, resolve and, ultimately, glory, that they inspire confidence in and of themselves.’ In fact, however, the two men despise one another; while their political ideas and their hatred of Bolshevism are as one, they are temperamental opposites. The Maréchal is a wise, serene and prudent man, and above all a miserly spender of French blood, as he demonstrated countless times during the Great War, for instance in 1917 when he put an end to the pointless Nivelle offensive and spared so many mutineers from the firing squad. Weygand, by contrast, is restless – the very picture of that dry, martial and impetuous French officer whose recklessness can lead his troops just as easily to victory as to destruction.

  We had heard nothing further from Olivier (last seen at Marguerite’s funeral on 29 December). A letter that I sent to him on 1 June, care of his regiment, was returned a few days later with the terse stamp ‘Undeliverable’.

  Hundreds of refugees from Belgium and Holland had been tramping through our town for weeks, pursuing their futile exodus to the south, a debacle that was accelerated with the fall of Amiens. I was driven to distraction by the sight of this miserable horde from my window, living proof of the anarchy of democracy and the failure of our Western European leaders to prepare appropriately.

  As Normandy anticipated attack from the air, measures were taken to protect the civilian population. Monsieur Duplessis, the Mayor, drew up a list of cellars that could serve as air-raid shelters, enacted public lighting regulations, and ordered automobile headlights to be painted blue.

  In order to gather more information, on 6 June I went to Paris, where I lunched with Monsieur de Lequerica, the Spanish Ambassador. He had held several private meetings with the Maréchal over recent days. The latter had acknowledged his belief that he was the man for the job, but that President Lebrun, a puppet in the hands of the parties, would not offer him the reins of power, while on the other hand a coup d’état – the only other way to secure them – was a serious matter that one did not consider lightly. The Maréchal doubted, too, that his voice would be heard by Chancellor Hitler if he offered peace talks. The Ambassador explained to me that this confession had been of great interest to the Spanish Minister for Foreign Affairs, who had brought it to the attention of General Franco. The latter had in turn offered Maréchal Pétain (his erstwhile teacher at the École de Guerre), via the intermediary of the Ambassador with whom I was lunching, a direct connection to the Führer. Spain, fearing the spread of a conflict that it wanted nothing to do with – its army having been bled white, and its government finding its forceful allies in Berlin and Rome more burdensome than anything else – wanted a rapid return to peace on its borders. I went home with the sense that Pétain was finally preparing himself to answer the call!

  Ilse and Hermione arrived at Andigny station the following day, Friday the 7th, with no prior warning. At table, my daughter-in-law, who was no longer in uniform, told me what had happened. On 26 May, her ambulance, a
ttached to the light cavalry corps, was caught under German fire at Haubourdin, in the north, and another nurse, her friend Germaine Colliard, had been killed. Ilse had been lucky to escape the planes. I trembled as I listened to her account. Her unit was scattered. Knowing first-hand the strength of the Germans and convinced that the war was already lost, Ilse had been concerned for Hermione and had returned to Paris by her own means to collect her daughter. We listened to the wireless together. Reading between the lines of the falsely reassuring reports, I gathered that Weygand, attacked on the Somme and the Aisne, was falling back under the weight of your divisions, and that the Royal Air Force had betrayed us. Paul Reynaud had reshuffled his government, but nothing could now contain the military and moral catastrophe. I sensed that our soldiers had succumbed to panic, which could not fail to spread like a flame on a trail of gunpowder. I fiddled with the radio dial until I found Radio Stuttgart. On the German airwaves, the old-time actor Obrecht, otherwise known as Saint-Germain, cackled as he read the lines prepared for him by Paul Ferdonnet, whom I had known at La Victoire and the Parti Socialiste National and who had already gone over to the enemy.

  ‘The Luftwaffe will be over the Seine valley by tomorrow! People of Andigny, get ready for a hot old time! Ha ha ha!’

  Ilse sat beside me and groaned, while over there in Stuttgart your announcer burst into laughter like a pantomime villain.

  That evening, a journalist friend telephoned me from Forges-les-Eaux. He was sitting at his dining-room window, looking at dust-covered German tanks parked pretty as you please beneath the trees in the square! As you know, Forges is only sixty kilometres from Andigny. Two armoured divisions from Hoth’s motorised corps, which had been thought to still be in Flanders, had launched an all-out assault against the Hornoy plateau, broken our lines and made a dash for the south! This astounding, tragic news meant that the road to Rouen was now open. And once Normandy had fallen, Paris would be caught in the pincers. From a strategic point of view, our little town, straddling one of the main bends of the Seine between Rouen and Vernon, was now an important objective for your high command. An aerial attack was therefore more than likely to be expected as early as the next day. My daughter-in-law begged me to help her escape. She was terrified of the Nazis, and I knew why.