In truth, if Jean-Claude evokes this chronicle of his origins, it is only to instruct me, the foreigner; the French know very well the accomplishments of his famous lineage.
Listening to him, what I find most remarkable is the exemplary aspect of the Servan-Schreibers’ epic. In their family, all the pieces of the immigration adventure achieve their highest expression: being torn from one’s original civilization, the ardently desired transplantation, and the successful putting down of roots by means of tenacious work and an unfailing loyalty to the country that welcomed them. The rush toward a new homeland was not dictated by a calculation of interests (Josef was already well-situated in Prussia), but by a dream of civil liberty and intellectual flourishing, an aspiration which, at the time, was synonymous with the name of France.
From their first steps on French soil, these immigrants did everything possible to “fit in,” as it would be described today, though this term is too close to the catchwords of the current dominant ideology. No, in the Schreibers’ case one must speak of passion, will, and the vital strength the family drew upon to accomplish their new birth. Their efforts went so far as breaking with the tradition of their ancestors (Josef’s father was a rabbi) and a profession of faith that timid minds would find excessive: Josef expressed a militant secularism, while his son Robert converted to Catholicism and left his children the freedom to choose their confessional affiliation—or non-affiliation. And when Robert married the daughter of Senator Fernand Crémieux, he refused to have any kind of religious ceremony. The venerable parliamentarian insisted upon the circumcision of the child the young couple had just had. Robert was vigorously opposed. Appalled, the senator then declared, “If you refuse, you will never be a député!”
Recounting this episode to me, Jean-Claude mischievously ends by saying, “That was how my foreskin cost my father his political career.”
There is another conclusion to be drawn from this anecdote: the tremendous contrast between the lively, carefree thinking that can be felt vibrating in each of Lieutenant Schreiber’s words and the suffocating ideas of political correctness that reigns in France today.
Far more than the mere sharing of an anecdote, his free way of speaking marks the path out of the mental quagmire that today forbids all sincere expression as soon as one broaches “sensitive” topics: immigration, integration, communitarianism, minorities. This discussion among hypocrites never dares to clearly point out that one must simply love the country that has shown you hospitality, and that to do that, it is not unhelpful to get rid of a few old rags—religion, customs, or other things—that make this generous hospitality more difficult.
Jean-Claude says this with not one note of controversy; it is a simple piece of wisdom confirmed by his family’s story and experience. The integration of tribes that each kept their own customs, idols, and rules for living? Hogwash! In order for roots to be put down in your new homeland, and to do so having gained the respect of those who are welcoming you, the only good path is assimilation. When in Rome, do as the Romans do!
This is what allowed Josef Schreiber’s descendants to become fully, and brilliantly, French. And it is from the creative and ardent energy of newcomers like them that any civilization can draw renewed vigor, develop, and become enriched, all while remaining itself. The alternative to this beautiful human adventure will only ever be a country’s fragmentation into aggressive and hateful minorities, into meager ghettos, and into communities that are more and more resistant to the common future of a nation.
For Jean-Claude, there is nothing dogmatic about this vision. It is a practical reality he describes in a calm voice, an obvious fact that does not need to be discussed.
The symbolic encounter between a foreigner and his adoptive country does, however, awaken an infinitely deeper emotion in the old man. Over the course of his long life, he must have often heard and read authors declaring their love for “the most beautiful country in the world,” for the French genius, and for France, land of refuge. Such swooning and flights of lyricism are not enough for Lieutenant Schreiber. He knows of something else that proves one’s attachment to a homeland: another measure, another criterion.
The spilled blood of a soldier.
Such was the proof given by his father Robert, who fought as an aviator during the Great War. Such was the “declaration of love,” hardly verbose, made by Jean-Claude Servan-Schreiber on the battlefields of the Second World War.
In the summer of 1944, after the landing in Provence, he ascended through the Rhône Valley at the head of his tank platoon. At the same time, his father, then sixty-four years old, was fighting in a communist Maquis in Neuvic.
What was it you all were calling it again? Multicultural identity?
The Art of Reading a Military Report
The title of the piece is as brittle as a burst of machine gun fire on the tiles of a roof: Journal of Marches and Operations of the Fourth Cuirassiers During the Campaign Against Germany from September 2 1939 to June 25 1940. A brochure of one hundred pages, printed in Bergerac in the first months after the armistice.
The chronicle recaptures, almost hour by hour, the military exploits of the Fourth Cuirassier Regiment.
Reading it elicits a disturbing feeling: though everything is well-recorded, dated, and localized, the narration’s distant chill gives the troops’ movements an immaterial appearance, almost dehumanized.
“Wednesday May 22. Bombardment of the line by enemy artillery…. Friday May 24. Captain Miquel, from the E.-M. of the 1st D.L.M., gives the order to retreat north, Canal de la Haute-Deule…. Sunday May 26. At nightfall, the Regiment moves into Annœullin. Situation unclear. The infantry abandons Carvin.”
Even when this telegraphic style mentions acts of heroism, the suffering of the wounded, and the death of fighters, there is still a sense of unreality, as if the writer of the document had intended it for a circle of initiates from which we are excluded. “Saturday May 18. Only Brigadier-Chief d’Ormesson’s tank was able to leave Jolimetz…. Thursday May 23. The P.C. of the Regiment received a serious dive bomb bombardment in Farbus. Several trucks and cisterns of fuel caught fire. Captain Henry saves an ammunitions truck during the bombardment despite the grave danger presented by the nearby fire … Lieutenant-Colonel Poupel is called to the P.C. of the Division at 20:30 to take command of all the tanks, Lieutenant-Colonel Pinon having been seriously injured…. Wednesday June 12. Violent anti-tank weapon response impossible to detect due to the configuration of the terrain. Sub-lieutenant Legendre gets out of his tank to liaison on foot with the D.P.s; he is shot at close range …”
This is a way of writing that, we must admit, is not particularly seeking a great degree of empathy from its readers. From time to time, though, these arid lines light up with the name of “Officer Cadet Schreiber” (the rank of lieutenant will come later) and the story regains vitality, for beyond its sentences I hear Jean-Claude’s voice, I make out his smile: “Tuesday May 28. Thanks to a bold reconnaissance mission by Officer Cadet Schreiber, the colonel was able to locate the position of the Vandières squadron in the Mounts of Flanders.”
Sometimes a section will awaken a personal memory in me, the shadow of another war—far less glorious—under the Afghan sky; one that taught me what could be hidden behind the frosty neutrality of a formal military report, behind observations like the one I am rereading in the Journal of Marches: “Saturday June 22. Sergeant Chalverat’s tank is destroyed and in flames. The crew could not be pulled out.”
In order to understand these words, one must imagine a beautiful summer evening, somewhere not far from Parthenay, gardens in bloom, the shady coolness of the waters of the Thouet … and without any intermediate scene, in this same idyllic décor, the definition of hell appears: the turret of a burning tank and three young men, dead or just shell shocked, their bodies destroyed or only riddled with minuscule shots, enough to kill. One of the tank drivers may still be alive; he is trying to forge a path through the smoke, the blood, th
e ripped flesh, the jagged steel. An inch or so of armored plating separates him from the pleasant sunset; he has time to see the sky through the turret opening, to cling to its burning metal … but the fire is already seizing him, devouring his face, setting his body alight, transforming him into a torch.
Such is the true sense of the chaste and austere military wording: “the crew could not be pulled out.”
Jean-Claude was not present at this tank battle (he had lived through and would live through many others). He had just been evacuated to a hospital after being wounded in the leg. His first war was coming to an end.
There still remained in him the certainty that he had to tell about what he had seen so often, to make people understand that the hell poets speak about could sometimes unfold in the middle of a radiant June evening, and that at dawn, while the flames were dying down over the shells of the armored tanks, the birds would peacefully take up their songs once more. And that in this world there was, therefore, a force, a principle, a superior will that made it possible for hell, evil, and death to take on this extreme banality. He thought about it, became lost, and then couldn’t find the words to express these realities, which were so obvious and so complex. Perhaps there was something to be said after all for the language in the Journal of Marches, for its bare and anesthetizing severity: “the tank is destroyed and in flames.” Period, new paragraph.
How else was one to accept the death of those young men burned alive under that beautiful sky turned pink by the setting sun, and who was there to blame? And how could other people be told about the physical truth of their death? And afterward, how was one to keep living without becoming a cynical boor, an unfeeling human automaton? How can a person not lose all reason after having spent time in the banality of hell?
Smile, Smile!
Coming out of his first military campaign at the age of twenty-two, Jean-Claude seems to have found the answer. He had forged for himself a way of being whose characteristics I discover in the Journal of Marches; not in the official part relating the battles, but in those inked dedications, words of friendship inscribed by his comrades in arms. I can make out the signatures of General Dubois de Beauchesne, Lieutenant de Vendières, and Captain Henry.
“With fond memories of my brave little liaison officer,” the general has written, underlining heavily the word “brave.”
“I don’t know what should be admired in you most—your profound disdain for danger or your sincere cheerfulness in the face of harsh blows….” Lieutenant de la Morsanglière wondered.
And here, an entire poem! Lieutenant Ville, in an impromptu balladry, had penned the following:
Write a thought for that kid, what’s there to say?
Except that one evening, he arrived back at camp
Laughing just like a little enfant!
One morning in spring, it’s raining iron but
Still he laughs, like a young tyke!
One day the border of France lights up,
We have to be everywhere that’s burning and strike, strike,
And he’s crying out to the old warriors: “Smile, smile!”
A dark and red sunset. Behind us, the sea.
Over our heads and in front of us, hell.
He makes light of it, coming out with jokes like a tiny bird!
Back on the beautiful soil of France.
Alas, all is lost. What does it matter,
For we are still trekking for honor.
The kid is still there, smiling and fearless.
Such was the response of this “kid,” of this “young tyke” in the face of the hell created by men. Was it some innate playfulness? The bantering humor of a reckless young boy? No, more like a survival technique, the art of overcoming fear, of not contaminating the others with his anxiety, of not letting himself be swept up by their despair, of helping to keep his comrades from sinking into denial. Yes, laugh and sing to hide his tears. Long before Lieutenant Ville’s poem, the stanzas of Petrarch sang the praises of this kind of attitude.
This saving lightness has determined the demeanor Jean-Claude adopts today when he talks about his past as a soldier: smiling detachment, no grandiloquence, and not a shadow of the boasting that is common among certain veterans.
Nor is it a false modesty. In agreement with the Journal of Marches, he very precisely defines his role during his first war in May–June 1940: chief of his regiment’s guide platoon. At the head of forty motorcyclists, he led reconnaissance on the ground to make the tanks’ movements easier, to find the best combat position, or to mark out the least dangerous path. And, very often, to reestablish a link with other combat units, the means of communication being most inadequate.
“From one tank to the next, we were supposed to communicate using flags,” Jean-Claude admits with an amused sigh.
He observes, summarizes, and lists the names of the towns his platoon passed through. And we sense in his account the fear he has of taking center stage, of attributing too much courage to himself. “No, my mission was simple,” he repeats from time to time.
Such as the day the commander of the regiment, Lieutenant-Colonel Poupel, asked him to find a lost tank squadron. He mounted his all-terrain motorcycle (a Terrot RATT) and left.
“All by yourself?”
“That’s what happened, yes….”
“Were you armed?”
“A pistol … an old Ruby with nine shots.”
“But as you rode, you must have passed close to German positions.”
“The fact is that … well, I passed behind their lines several times. But no, not one shot in my direction. A stroke of luck, probably….”
On his motorcycle he encountered Germans and successfully escaped them, skirted them once again, and crossed through occupied villages, coming so close to the enemy that at one bend in the road, he heard soldiers’ conversations and intercepted an officer’s stunned gaze.
A stroke of luck, he says, so as not to admit what truly saved him: an audacious folly, an impudence that Teutonic logic had not included in its tactical calculations. Yes, the same panache that, in the past, in the books he read as a child, he had always admired in French fighters like Bayard and Cyrano.
Seeing my reaction, he guesses that I might see in these “simple missions” an act of bravery, a gesture of abnegation. He is quick to specify: “What helped me most of all was my raincoat. From far away, it looked like the hoods the German noncommissioned officers wore. In fact, I used to tell myself that what I was risking most by being dressed like that was getting shot down by a French patrol.”
He laughs softly, becoming once more that “kid” who, even under barrages of enemy fire, could still put his comrades in a good mood.
In his voice, I also detect a kind of sheepish regret: no, he cannot talk about the war except in this smiling, sincere tone, one that is too light for the pedantic works of history.
A Wandering Soldier
He does not change his tone to speak about his second campaign. Still a factual precision worthy of the Journal of Marches. In April 1941, he receives the following official notice: “Lieutenant Schreiber being Jewish, the law of October 3 1940 must apply to him fully.” The same day, he is given his Médaille militaire. A pleasant bureaucratic caprice: let’s decorate this soldier, and while we’re at it, let’s dismiss him from the army.
His second war begins when he enlists in the Resistance group “Liberté,” which would later be merged with the “Combat” group. While completing his doctorate in law at the University of Grenoble, he often makes the trip between that city and the family home in Montfrin, giving him the opportunity to collect weapons abandoned by the army, transport them to their recipients, and lay out caches.
His noticeable sternness is to be expected: “That day, I handed weapons over to Simon and Jean Nora. Later on, they would fight in the Vercors.”
“And what if your clandestine activity had been discovered, Jean-Claude?”
“I would have been arrested,
clearly.”
He does not develop this hypothesis further. As is the case with the Journal of Marches, one must read between the lines, hear between the words: every day those three young men, Jean-Claude, Simon, and Jean, risked being caught red-handed next to a cache or in their own homes, being torn from their sleep, and then being subjected to interrogations, torture, and a selection of limited options: death during transfer to a camp or while in a camp or, more likely than not, under the bullets of an execution squad.
I am on the verge of voicing this possibility, which would lend their actions a dramatic human texture, as well as what we—in order to avoid the word heroism—will call the force of a remarkable achievement. Jean-Claude succeeds, once again, in mitigating this serious turn. “You know, in Grenoble the police were not always openly hostile to the Resistance. I remember one evening a commissaire warned me about the likelihood of a raid at one of the caches where I had weapons stocked. In Montfrin, on the other hand, the policemen took me for an anti-national renegade. In fact, if the Gestapo were coming to arrest me on November 11, 1942, it was because of information delivered by the local police…. With Sabine, I was able to flee from under their noses at the very last minute.”
An escape, the side of the road unsettled by the caterpillar tracks of German tanks, the station in Tarascon, the missed train to Marseille, and a hotel where, right in the faces of their pursuers, the young couple live a long morning of love.
I have understood this for some time: Jean-Claude will never know how to, or will never want to, talk about his war if it means burdening others with the painful moments, accentuating the fears and sufferings, or complaining about the agonizing landscapes of occupied cities, patrolled streets, and houses turning into traps.
His credo of lightness is not an aesthete’s posturing. He acquired this vision—one that does not blacken the world or demonize men—in the years when the world was infinitely dark and men, in their cruelty, were competing with the most diabolical scum. He opposed that universe with his soldierly courage, his cheerfulness like that of a “young tyke,” his smile like an “enfant.” His comrades, those “old” fighters of thirty or forty years of age, were grateful to him for these instants of humanity that resisted the dull horror of Panzers and the piercing screams of attacking Stukas.
Lieutenant Schreiber's Country Page 3