Copyright © Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2014
English-language translation copyright © 2018 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
First English-language edition
First published in France in 2014 under the title Le pays du lieutenant Schreiber
Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].
Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.
Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Brian Peterson
ISBN: 978-1-62872-804-0
EISBN: 978-1-62872-807-1
Printed in the United States of America
I dedicate this book to all of
Lieutenant Schreiber’s brothers in arms,
and to all their loved ones.
There are those who say I am in alliance with communists, Freemasons, and Jews, while others claim that I want to turn France into a monarchy, an empire, even a dictatorship. These imaginative people are all forgetting just one thing: France is invaded … and if this were not the case I would still be an officer in our army, expecting to end my career, and I am not a politician but simply a patriot who wants to liberate his country.
—General de Gaulle, in Charles de Gaulle by Philippe Barrès
(Translated by Grace McQuillan)
I am just a humble soldier in your combat forces …
—Jean-Claude Servan-Schreiber, Letter to General de Gaulle (Translated by Grace McQuillan)
CONTENTS
I: One Century, One Life
A Man Standing Up
A Reader
The Museum of a Man
II: His Three Wars
The Identity of a Soldier
The Art of Reading a Military Report
Smile, Smile!
A Wandering Soldier
The Masks of Evil
Beyond Wars
History’s Final Word
The Words of an Unknown Woman
III: The Foreigner
At the Other People’s Party
Impure Luck
Double-Edged
A Sentinel with No Replacement
IV: The War of Words
A Character in Search of a Book
The Era of Suspicion
The True Sense of the Word “Gentleman”
Waiting for D-Day
This is How Books Live
Final Rounds
A Meteorite
V: His Own Sky
Under a Sign
The Words for Another Life
VI: Beyond Words
In the Name of a Soldier
A Burned Tree
A Message
Notes
I
One Century, One Life
A Man Standing Up
He leans on the armrests of his chair, squeezes them forcefully, and begins to straighten up; a slow elevation, a gradual wrenching away from gravity. The expression in his eyes betrays a hint of resentment: ah, this body that no longer obeys with the same briskness it used to.
Tonight, as I am so emotional, I must have climbed the stairs more quickly than usual, and this is why at the present moment I have surprised him in this hampered effort.
Every other time, he had welcomed me standing in the middle of his living room; a figure incredibly svelte for his age and a brief smile, one for greeting a friend, not playing at polite conversation. A firm, dry handshake. His physique would have made social comedy difficult, indeed: a square face, white hair in a crew cut, a skull constructed from planes of flint, the hard line of his nose, and a sort of family resemblance to Kirk Douglas in Spartacus.
I linger in the entryway to allow him enough time to get up, leave his office, and come into the living room. Seeing him fight against the burden of his body pains me. It is easy for me to find a justification for the slowness of his movements. Yes, it must be age: ninety-two years! And that heart issue a few months ago that earned him a stay at Val-de-Grâce. But most of all, it is August; the Parisian heat is stifling, with not a single breath of air.
These explanations tell only part of the truth. There is another reason for the pain I feel as I watch the old man stand up.
Today I am bringing him bad news.
It is the fear of hurting him that plunges me into slow motion, where every movement seems to last for long minutes in which the outline of his life passes through my mind.
A young officer, the Battle of France, May–June 1940, Fourth Cuirassier Regiment, Belgium, Flanders, Dunkirk, tank battles, desperate but tenacious resistance, the death of comrades, missions behind German lines, more fighting. In the Eure, his first wound, discharged from the army for being Jewish, fleeing to Spain, prison, concentration camp, Morocco, Algeria, Fifth African Chasseur Regiment of the First Armored Division, landing in le Midi, France’s liberation, and victory celebrated in the mountains of Bavaria, not far from the Berghof, Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest.”
It is this same soldier, this same man, who is currently in the process of standing up from his armchair. An August evening, 2010.
And it is to him that I am going to have to break this news: his life no longer interests anyone! His war awakens no recollection; his comrades, fallen for their country, have been erased from every memory; and he himself is nothing more than this old man who is, just barely, getting to his feet.
Lieutenant Schreiber.
His book, devoted to his youth, was published in May, three months ago. There had been a disastrous waiting period, at the end of which every copy, having failed to achieve success, disappeared from bookstores. Since his story’s release, we have watched for the slightest mention, a review, an interview, a short news item … nothing. Nowhere. Not one article in any of the “reference” journals, not one sign of interest on the airwaves or on the screens.
Total indifference; more effective than totalitarian censorship.
And now, the summary execution that strikes every book unable to break through the indifference: the masher. A small volume filled with sufferings, joys, and hopes; its pages inhabited by humble and magnificent heroes, the soldiers who died for France, words so simple that rang so true. All of this is going to be torn to pieces, crushed, transformed into paper dust, a grayish paste, ready to be recycled.
“The cover of his book will be the first to go,” I say to myself, and I see once again that photo in my mind. It’s 1944, and from the turret of his tank the young Lieutenant Schreiber scans a plain covered in snow, somewhere in Alsace; a face both youthful and hardened by the atrocities it has seen.
It is this face that will be lacerated, rolled, and crumbled by the book-killing machine.
A life that six years of war could not destroy will be annihilated in a few seconds.
The pain I feel is so deep that I rush into the living room without waiting any longer. The old man comes to greet me, shakes my hand, and smiles, a shadow of weariness beneath his gaze.
The storm has broken in the distance, sending none of its
lightning over Paris, just a vague rumbling and a steady-sounding rain; drowsy, a lightly golden dusk. The flowers on the balcony, dulled by the heat, find their shades again.
We do not turn on the lights; we keep the silence. I hope he will start talking, as he always does, about the years of his youth, sometimes turning toward one of the photos that cover the walls, sometimes toward that little model Sherman, the armored tank he fought aboard—in fact, he’d had to abandon one of those on the roads of the war, burned or tunneled by shells. Echoing names that no longer mean anything to anyone, and whose importance in the young soldier Schreiber’s future I now know: Lieutenant-Colonel Poupel, Captain Hubert de Seguins-Pazzis, and other famous names, too; illustrious men he met (de Gaulle, de Lattre …) who, thanks to his words, will leave the pedestals of their statues for a few minutes. Then names of villages, in Flanders, in Normandy, in the Gard, in Burgundy; places where his memory can still make out the platoon of tanks under enemy fire, the wounded comrade he manages to move out of the way of the shrapnel, the young Alsatian girl in a liberated town who lets out a cry of joy: “Maman, they’re speaking French on the main road!”
These are fragments of a shattered country, of the France he loves so much, the France that he and his brothers in arms, day after day, tried to glue back together with their blood.
I am waiting for his narrative to begin so I can—in veiled terms, taking a thousand precautions—tell him the news of the failure: in a few days, his book, which we had believed in so much, will no longer exist. I will tell him some other way; I will use euphemisms and understatements, I will go in stages, I will put it in perspective, I will muddy the waters. For weeks, sensing the outcome, I have been thinking about how to muffle the shock. I feel partially responsible for this defeat; it was on my advice that the old soldier had decided to write his memoirs. Just like each of our previous meetings, we will talk about this war chronicle and then it will be easy for me to express a few regrets about the situation: our contemporaries, alas, are most interested in soccer and tennis championships, and the media prefers light books that can be talked about having only skimmed the back cover … your Battle of France, my lieutenant, just think!
But the old man stays quiet. In the fading light, his profile stands out with a hard, proud clarity. Those eyes with tired lids nevertheless express an almost tender detachment, accentuated by the slightly smiling line of his lips and the abandon of his hands, unmoving on his knees.
Suddenly, very clearly, I realize he doesn’t need a messenger to guess what is happening to his book. A defeat? He has lived through a few during his long life. He knows their sly approach, their predatory maneuvering around your existence, and then—the attack, the impossibility of fending it off, the rapid exhaustion of hope. The fall. And the duty to get up, to start fighting again. He has always behaved this way. Fighting, falling, standing back up. But today, he is probably telling himself that at his age, he will not have the energy needed to engage in a final battle.
He lifts his head. Following his gaze, I see a reflection of the past sitting in the middle of his bookshelf: a photo hardly bigger than a passport picture. I have seen it before. I am familiar with this shot, tinted gray; a somewhat unsuccessful photo because the young woman posing hasn’t exactly had the time to strike her pose. Her head is leaning forward in an interrupted movement toward the lens; an emerging smile, a hand blurred by an abrupt gesture. She is probably about to tidy her dark curls being lifted by the wind. A black dress and the clear thin line of a clavicle, a glimpse of which is allowed by the collar’s low neckline.
At first, the old man’s words seem to mingle with the wind whose breath I feel in the old snapshot.
“With Sabine, I fled the house at four in the morning … you could already hear the roar of the German tanks on the road from Beaucaire and Tarascon. I didn’t know yet that this getaway would lead me to Spain, then to Africa … and then all the way to Berlin!”
Sabine Wormser had to leave Lyon after the invasion of the zone libre. Then they hid, the two of them, at the Schreiber family residence in Montfrin, a village at the confluence of the Rhône and the Gard. In November 1942, this place also became too dangerous.
On November 11, awakened by the noise of tanks, they run away via a secret door at the very moment that Gestapo agents, accompanied by a gendarme, appear at the gate. The young Schreiber’s Resistance activities have not gone unnoticed. The couple takes off on foot, first following the banks of the Gard, then walking along the road congested with German troops. The soldiers pay no attention to these two “hikers,” prey too meager for their machine guns and cannons. The lovers are able to catch a bus that takes them to Tarascon. From there, they intend to go to Marseille. The important thing is to quickly leave the familiar surroundings that are tightening around them like a net.
Bad luck: the train to Marseille has just left and the Gestapo, well informed, know that the runaways will be forced to go through the station in Tarascon. A German car is already patrolling the area.
“Why don’t we get a room?” the young man asks his friend.
Unaware or too aware of the danger, they push open the door of a hotel next to the station, go up to a room, and forget themselves in love. Those pursuing them imagine the two crouching at the back of the waiting area or in the corner of a café, disfigured by fear, devoured by anxiety. And yet they are in a bed, united in an embrace that defies all the fears in the world.
The old man has already told me this story. His book mentions it, too. A breathtaking thumbing of their noses at the inevitability of hatred, a beautiful and gallant last stand against the intentions of persecutors buttoned into leather coats.
Tonight he recounts the episode a little differently, as if the distance from that wartime past makes the lovers’ triumph too obvious to be celebrated. Yes, his words are different; his tone, too. The slowness of the words allows me to imagine a secret backdrop for that far-off November morning. The windows of the hotel room are brightened by large plane tree leaves, already golden and shining under a light, warm, sun-colored rain. The wind blows and causes a shutter to move, closing itself as if to protect the fugitives’ threatened intimacy. Intoxicated with love, the young woman has dozed off, holding onto a hint of a smile, a sigh frozen on her half-opened lips. The man stays awake, not moving, astonished by the absence of fear; then, forgetting even this astonishment, he becomes more and more aware that he is living the essence of his life. With incredulous joy, he discovers that this essence stems from the sunlit wind passing through the foliage, from the drizzle bathing the windows in color, from the flat hammering of a train. From the presence of their naked bodies in this room, so close to brute and hostile force. From the freedom they have to snub the world in this room, to think it truly shallow with its hatreds, its cruelty, and its lies … this truth appears so dazzling to the man that he tightly squeezes his eyelids shut.
I leave Jean-Claude without having dared speak to him about his book. He goes out onto the landing with me, presses the light switch, and it’s only in the stairwell that his voice catches up with me, a tone at once resigned and smiling: “It’s Kipling who said it, no? Triumph and disaster … those two impostors.”
The next day, I call him to see how he is doing. In actual fact, it is to reassure myself that this particular failure, the one I was not brave enough to talk to him about, has not affected him too much. He answers in a firm voice, a little sharp; his usual voice. “Everything is fine, thank you. I’m still standing.”
A Reader
Four years earlier, in June 2006, I had received a letter that resembled—I will explain why—a friendly voice heard by a man walking in the middle of a desert.
Cher Monsieur,
Your book, Cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer, touched me very much. All the more so because in it you mention two individuals I knew well, having been in prison and in a concentration camp with them in Spain from December 1942 to May 1943. I am referring to Colonel Desaz
ars de Montgailhard and Captain Combaud de Roquebrune.
If this interests you, and if you have a few minutes to spare, come for a whiskey at my place. You may, if you truly wish to, hear a few stories concerning them.
I almost forgot to introduce myself: I am eighty-eight years old, received the Médaille militaire at Dunkirk in 1940, landed at La Nartelle on August 16, 1944 at the head of my tank platoon, and finished in Bavaria on the Austrian Front in May 1945. I am also a Military Commander in the Legion of Honor. I am the grandson of German Jews who immigrated in 1877, and am proud to have fought for my beautiful country.
See you soon, perhaps. Very sincerely yours,
Jean-Claude Servan-Schreiber
When it was published, the short essay Cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer had brought down around me the aforementioned desert silence. “Everyone knows that what you are saying about France today is true,” a journalist friend confessed to me, “but no one will ever be brave enough to admit it.”
The note from Lieutenant Schreiber arrived at the moment I was finally becoming used to crossing this desert, telling myself that it was not the first time nor, probably, the last. More precisely, his letter—the voice I made out behind his lines—reestablished the only connection to which an author should attach any importance: having his text understood and appreciated by a reader. A communion of ideas. A unique encounter. Who cares about the rest?
At first, in fact, it was the improbable temporal collision that struck me most: my correspondent had personally known the two French officers whose names I had discovered, rather by accident, in an old brochure written under the Occupation! He had mingled with these ghosts who had seemed irretrievably frozen in a period, whose living echoes were never heard anymore. Thanks to him, these two shadows were going to be reborn, each one acquiring a unique character, a life in its original relief, a distinct physiognomy. Fully incarnated, these unknown men would explain how, more than sixty years ago, they had crossed paths with a young Lieutenant Schreiber, sharing his miseries as a prisoner and his activity as a soldier.
Lieutenant Schreiber's Country Page 1