Monsieur le Commandant

by Romain Slocombe

  We spent eight days in Rânes, where my daughter-in-law cared for me with admirable devotion. The room was furnished with a big old peasant bed, and the café owner’s wife had a cot brought in for Hermione. It was in this way that circumstances led me, for the first time in my life, to share a bed with my son’s spouse.

  I was barely aware of this development on the first night, having succumbed to a high fever. The past and the present intermingled in my consciousness; I spoke to Marguerite, to Jeanne, and when I came to I found myself trembling with humiliation. I had been incapable of protecting the person I loved; rather, it had been she who had saved us by putting our attackers to flight, calling me an ‘old man’ and claiming me as her father.

  Her father. Was that how Ilse thought of me? I considered this question for the first time. In the eyes of the German, of the Jewess, was I a substitute for her own father, lost somewhere in Berlin or Palestine, and perhaps dead? Was the affection in which the young woman clearly held me merely – I say ‘merely’, though it was undoubtedly deeply as well – a filial one?

  I had lost Jeanne, my precious child, but had not the Lord in His infinite goodness compensated me with the love and presence of a second daughter?

  If that were the case, the ‘amorous’ love that I experienced for her in such an incandescent way was an abominable and blasphemous one.

  In the middle of the night I burst into hysterical laughter; my bedfellow thought that I was delirious. I heard the roof timbers creaking in the wind, the wood cracking; my body was racked with trembling, and my hair stood on end. I tossed and turned, the sheets damp with my sweat, a taste of ashes in my mouth and nausea rising in my belly, my guts in knots. I was back in the trenches; shells whistled overhead and churned the martyred earth. The sky was yellow. I found myself once again in the ‘ravine of death’ between Douaumont and Vaux. Branchless tree trunks pointing at the sky. A donkey struck down, half-eaten by dogs; headless German corpses. I pushed back the sheets, raised my fist and cried out to the Almighty: ‘He who created ears, will He not hear me without ears? He who created eyes, will He not see me without eyes?’ A nurse in a white veil held me by the shoulders, begged me to remain calm. Sobbing, I called her Jeanne. ‘Jeanne, my darling girl, you have returned from the dead …’

  Ilse turned away, and I heard her crying.

  13.

  The fever broke after three days.

  To the north, the roar of cannon fire drew nearer.

  The hordes of refugees continued to stream through town, heading west and south.

  From my bed, I could hear the popular songs being played on the wireless in the main dining room. Danielle Darrieux was a regular feature:

  My first is a tender glance,

  My second is a mocking smile,

  My third, the words I long to hear,

  And my whole lies inside my heart.

  On the evening of Tuesday the 11th, we heard the sound of aeroplane engines. Supported by my nurse, I went out into the garden. A bomber was approaching from the south at low altitude. The plane was swerving in distress, long orange flames leaping from its wings and cockpit. There was a crackling sound. The pilot seemed to be desperately searching for a place to land. Night was falling, and I was unable to make out the aircraft’s markings, but in any case I did not see the Luftwaffe’s black crosses on the undersides of its wings.

  The bomber passed by in a deafening roar only twenty metres overhead. I thought I saw figures silhouetted against the flames. A stink of burning filled the air above the garden, where we stood with our eyes turned to the deep-blue sky, still bright in the west, while Ilse held me steady with her left arm around my waist. The plane disappeared from sight, the noise of the engines receded, rose, then receded again. A few minutes later there was an explosion, followed by a brief orange flash to the north-west. Ilse’s grip tightened on my flesh, her shivering body pressed against mine, then she leaned her head towards me and I felt her hair on my neck. I draped my one arm around her shoulders, and we stayed that way for several minutes without speaking. Then we returned to the shed, where Hermione slept undisturbed.

  The next morning, the café owner told us that the plane had fallen at La Boulardière, near Orgères, and that one wing had been found as far away as La Brousse. Some locals had gone in little groups to see the wreckage. It was an English Whitney bomber. Five bodies had been found inside, charred beyond recognition. A torn parachute hung across a hedgerow. French soldiers from a regiment temporarily garrisoned in Gacé were guarding the site, where an army interpreter had recovered the flight plans. The plane had taken off from Jersey on a night bombing mission to Turin, in response to Mussolini’s declaration of war. It may have been hit by defensive anti-aircraft fire while crossing the front line. Ilse suggested that in the general confusion those poor Englishmen, who had been coming from the south when we saw them, had been hit by our people, and had turned back in an attempt to get home.

  In the following days, a great number of French troops poured in from the west to take up positions in the region and face the German divisions that had overrun the Fontainebleau forest. The 3rd Armoured Car Regiment set up headquarters between Rânes and La Ferté-Macé. We were torn between leaving, and running the risk of being caught on the road in the midst of fighting, and staying at the café, at the mercy of the bombs.

  Day after day I put off making the decision until the morrow, while in reality I was savouring my nights of burning intimacy with my daughter-in-law. I did not allow myself to touch or even brush against her, in spite of her proximity and my desire, but I felt her warmth, inhaled her scent, and listened to her breathing in the night so close at hand, and sometimes moaning in restless slumber. My heart beat faster when I heard her sweet groans, and I felt my hardened member pulse for her.

  On 17 June, with cannon fire in the near distance, a large crowd of locals gathered in the main dining room of the café to hear an important announcement on the radio. At 12.30 p.m., the Maréchal began his speech; his voice sounded oddly weak to me. It’s true that the Victor of Verdun was eighty-four years old that day when destiny decreed that he should be called a second time to the salvation of his Motherland.

  People of France, at the request of the President of the Republic, as of today I have assumed leadership of the government. Convinced of the devotion in which I am held by our admirable army, which is fighting with a heroism worthy of its historic military traditions against an enemy superior in numbers and weaponry; convinced that in its magnificent resistance it has fulfilled its obligations to its allies; convinced of the support of the veterans whom I have had the honour to command, today I consecrate myself to France to attenuate her misfortune …

  A clamour erupted, punctuated by diverse commentary, a few shouts of ‘Long live Pétain!’, including my own, loud and clear: ‘Long live Pétain!’

  The speech continued: ‘It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today to lay down your weapons. I contacted the enemy last night to ask whether he is ready to discuss with us …’

  Loud sobs rang out on all sides, and when I turned to Ilse, I saw that her German cheeks, too, were bathed in tears.

  The Maréchal’s address ended soon afterwards, but the remainder was drowned out in the uproar, and the ‘Marseillaise’ was broadcast on the wireless immediately thereafter. Those who had been sitting rose to their feet, and the entire crowd stood to attention. At that moment, every single person in that café in Rânes – man or woman, young or old – was in tears.

  An angry rumbling was heard outside on the square, and we watched as a convoy of French military vehicles overran the town centre in a cloud of dust. A section of 75 mm guns took up position. An officer burst into the café and ordered all civilians to drop everything they were doing and evacuate westward, towards Saint-Fraimbault, or else to seek shelter in their cellars. A decisive battle was about to take place in the area. The café owner’s wife protested that Maréchal Pétain had just announced a ceasefire.
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  In a tone that admitted no rejoinder, the officer replied that he was squadron leader Jacques Weygand, the son of Maréchal Weygand, that his father would never capitulate in the midst of a campaign, that he had received no order to cease fire, that Pétain was known for his defeatism, and that here the French Army would fight to the very last man.

  The captain’s fierce pride reminded me of myself in my youth, and I admired it despite the fact that Pétain’s rise to power had been my deepest wish, and that I was convinced that the way forward he had proposed was the only one that made any sense.

  I took Ilse by the arm and announced that we had to leave Rânes without delay. The café owner had parked the Rochet-Schneider in his garage. I settled with that good man, and he and his wife helped to gather our belongings and pack the car. Hermione resumed her place in the back. The 75s deployed at the edge of town began to fire with a terrible racket. On the square, two wounded cavalry soldiers informed Captain Weygand that a sizeable column of motorised German infantry was approaching, and the captain ordered a young tank commander to go out to meet them.

  As we left Rânes in a long, slow-moving file of trucks, cars and carts, from the top of a hill we saw unfold the Dantesque spectacle of a column of German tanks some five or six kilometres to the north-east, moving openly and flying little white pennants. The Panzers drove before them a scattered crowd of refugees, who ran with their hands up, abandoning their luggage, amidst dust-covered automobiles weaving across the fields, units of infantrymen who had fallen back from the failed attempt to cross the Orne, and disarmed soldiers from both sides whom the combatants caught up in the fighting had neglected to take prisoner. Shells exploded in the midst of this vast chaos, fortunately without doing great harm, while the fleeing figures continued to run in our direction as the column of Panzers closed in.

  I watched the battle helplessly, mesmerised by the action. To the east, I saw three of our armoured vehicles moving along the groves and hedges, two on one side and one on the other, concealed from the view of a column of some forty German troop carriers. Your helmeted soldiers, clustered at the back of the trucks and unaware of the rapid approach of our light tanks, were singing at the top of their lungs. The wind carried snippets of their song all the way to us.

  The three tanks turned abruptly to take the column from the rear. One pulled up directly behind the last truck and fired on it point-blank, sending mutilated bodies into the air. At my side, Ilse let out a cry. The tanks now ran alongside the column at full speed, blowing up the carriers one after the other and machine-gunning those who tried to flee. By the time we came to a bend in the road that blocked our view of the fighting all around Rânes, the entire column of trucks was nothing but a vast smoking ruin of blackened iron and shredded corpses.

  We ran across a motorcycle platoon leading tanks to the defence of La Ferté-Macé. Clearly, in spite of the Maréchal’s call to lay down arms, a terrible clash was in the making for the Orne and the Mayenne – perhaps the last fighting of the French campaign. The motorcyclists sped on towards Carrouges, while our car moved off in the opposite direction. Hermione managed to sleep despite all the gunfire, and my daughter-in-law turned to cover her with a blanket.

  Later, towards dusk, having found protection behind the lines of the Tenth Army, which continued to fall back towards Brittany with the aim of defending a hypothetical ‘Breton enclave’, with heavy hearts and tear-filled eyes we contemplated in the dying light the vast, dark oceans of the Andaines and Écouves forests. In the distance flames rose from bombed villages: Rânes, Carrouges, Saint-Georges-d’Annebecq, while in Saint-Fraimbault the last of our heroic troops, remnants of the 3rd Mobile Artillery Regiment and the 13th Light Motorised Brigade that had been attacked from all sides, were reduced to surrender.

  14.

  We resumed our journey southward, for I had not given up on my plan to cross the Loire.

  The horrendous spectacle of defeat was all around us. The roadside verges were strewn with abandoned vehicles, the bodywork battered, windows smashed and chassis dismantled, stripped of their wheels, engines and anything serviceable. Some cars bore the scars of German strafing: little oblong holes across their roofs; their seats and banquettes stained with large brown puddles of dried blood. At the side of the road we saw little hillocks of freshly turned earth, topped with a tragic cross hurriedly assembled with branches. Haphazard objects, knick-knacks, toys, boxes, suitcases, waterlogged papers, rags and torn clothing littered the ground between carts with broken axles or shafts, ambulances scorched by fire, dead horses with great hunks of flesh torn away, exposing the white ribs, broken-down motorcycles with their sidecars, bicycle frames without wheels, overturned perambulators, empty trailers, burned tyres, abandoned field kitchens …

  There were rumours circulating that the Germans had already crossed the Loire; that many bridges had been destroyed to slow the enemy’s progress; that, on the contrary, General Griveaud, commander of the Eleventh Region, had refused to blow up the bridges of the city he had been assigned to defend; that all towns of more than 20,000 inhabitants had been declared open cities by the new government; that the Italian air force was bombing Orléans, Blois, Tours, Saumur, Angers. The localities through which we passed were awash with white flags. In Craon, some sixty kilometres short of Angers, we were told that France had been divided into two zones, and that the Germans would forbid us from crossing the demarcation line. Our flight, all the risks we had taken, had been in vain. The only thing left to do was to return to Paris.

  At a restaurant in Château-Gontier where we stopped for lunch, I encountered someone I knew, Josyane C., a proofreader at my publishing house. The young woman had fled Paris with her mother, a most distinguished lady who would now have to find her own way back to Paris, while Mademoiselle C. was determined to push on for Spain, and from there to join up with de Gaulle, whom she had heard broadcast a radio appeal for the war to be pursued from across the Channel. As the British would no doubt be suing for peace soon enough – they were merely raising the stakes in order to secure better conditions than those to which the extent of our own defeat had exposed us – I thought that this was an utterly unrealistic and even anti-French prospect that was doomed to utter failure. I nevertheless invited Madame C. to join us, making room next to Hermione by jettisoning the empty petrol cans.

  In mid-afternoon of the following day we reached Le Mans, now occupied by the Wehrmacht. The tank of the Rochet-Schneider was nearly empty, and we could not take the risk of breaking down in the middle of the countryside. Hundreds of motorists seemed to be in the same situation, and had spread their bedding over the ground in the main square in the centre of town, resigned to camping out in their cars, while a German truck blared Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods from a loudspeaker mounted on its roof. The tables and chairs of the café terraces lining the square were filled with soldiers and officers in blue-green uniform, while a few women who had hastened to consort with the victor mingled among them.

  The merchants of Le Mans had been cleaned out by the flood of people, and we ourselves had exhausted our provisions. Restaurants and hotels all declared themselves full, and the shelves of the grocers’ shops were bare. The money I had brought with me from Andigny, hidden beneath my clothes (I had taken the precaution of dressing as a civilian this time, French officers having become quite unpopular of late), was therefore useless to us. All that remained was one bottle of red wine, which we shared with our nearest neighbours in the encampment, an American in his fifties and his companion, a young mulatta from the French Antilles. They readily offered us sandwiches, put together with their last cans of sardines and a loaf of bread that the resourceful American had managed to track down at a local bakery. The couple, who lived in the Paris suburbs, were returning from Les Sables-d’Olonne, where, like us, they had found themselves caught behind the new border. I don’t know why, but I told them that I was travelling with ‘my wife, my daughter and my mother’. Old Madame C. seemed to find the
improvisation amusing, if a little cheeky; Hermione burst out laughing, and my daughter-in-law blushed. I think that, unconsciously, I wanted to avenge myself for the lie she had told during our skirmish in Rânes. If she thought fit to pass me off as her father, I would get back at her by choosing to call her my wife.

  The American seemed to be excessively taken by Ilse’s beauty. He explained that he was a photographer and would be glad to take her portrait. His heavy Yankee accent was rather comical and somewhat mitigated the earnestness of his proposal. It was still broad daylight at eight o’clock as we emptied the bottle and chatted amiably. Soon the negress and Ilse, always sociable, were calling each other ‘Ady’ and ‘Ilsy’. The photographer, who gave his name as Man Ray, associated with a number of prominent Parisians in the arts and letters, such as Jean Cocteau, whom he boasted of having photographed, as well as Picasso and the couturier Paul Poiret. At the time, I thought that I was dealing with an affable mythomaniac, but I later learned that this good-natured American artist, who ultimately returned to his own country, was telling the truth. He was in with the Surrealist group. We had a rather heated political argument. Man Ray claimed to be an ‘anarchist’ and anti-Nazi, whereas I demonstrated that the Maréchal’s rise to power was the only way to end the prevailing chaos and to stop the bloodshed. As to those so-called Nazis – in my opinion, they were more likely to be honest peasants or clerks whom Hitler had rallied to the flag – who were dining with all the ingenuousness of tourists, easy-going and jovial despite the exhaustion of campaigning, at the café terraces surrounding the square while regaling us with high-quality music (the American retorted that he hated Wagner) – now that they had won their fight, had they not proven to be remarkably peaceful, merciful and disciplined victors?