Lieutenant Schreiber's Country

by Andrei Makine

  At first, beneath the bombs and volleys of shots, he must have had to make an effort to continue to be what the others saw in him: a smiling and fearless tiny bird. Then, this nature, fashioned by the war, became his own nature, his way of living and seeing the world. And age can do nothing to change it.

  “He will never know how to tell it differently,” I think. So much the better! For this is how, I am certain, he would speak about it with his comrades in arms today, if he could find them.

  The Masks of Evil

  On the night of November 25, 1942, Lieutenant Schreiber, guided by a smuggler, crosses the Franco-Spanish border after walking for five hours over mountain trails. Apprehended by the police, he is brought to the prison in Figueres where fifty other Frenchmen are detained. At the end of one week’s incarceration, they are put into a cattle car. A forty-eight-hour journey to the Miranda de Ebro concentration camp.

  Another hell created by men: 3,500 people squeezed against one another in unsanitary shacks hastily divided into “blocks” with pieces of cardboard and blankets; hunger, disease, and overcrowding that forces prisoners to sleep on the floor.

  “No, there can be no comparison with the Nazi camps,” Jean-Claude is quick to clarify. “It was no gulag, either. Though, as luck would have it, I caught a dreadful staphylococcus there! What else would you expect? Even back at Figueres the prison had been swarming with vermin, and then in the camp we were drowning in filth. Not a drop of water to wash with. My health was deteriorating and I had huge boils under my arms. Fortunately, among the prisoners there was a doctor, a Hungarian Jew. He offered to lance the most menacing of the boils for me. His scalpel was a thin piece of glass cut from inside a jelly jar and sharpened on a sliver of brick…. I was sharing my ‘block’ with some young French factory workers, communists who had been able to escape the camp in Châteaubriant. They decided to give me a hand during the operation. Those guys thought I was a soft bourgeois who would pass out immediately and need to be carried back to my pallet, unconscious. So they had designated one of their comrades to accompany me. Oh yes, a brief suspension of class warfare! Well, when the Hungarian pierced my boil, it was the commie, my ‘helper,’ who had to turn his head away, and I was forced to drag him home on my back. ‘For a bourgeois, you’re not so bad!’ his comrades told me.”

  It is out of the question to dwell on the miseries he experiences as a prisoner. Especially since that prisoner has always been considered by Spanish authorities to be an American officer (the three years spent at Oxford make young Schreiber’s alibi more plausible). In the spring of 1943, the military attaché from the United States is able to dispatch his “compatriot” to Gibraltar. There, the English intelligence services examine the case of this peculiar “American” officer: a search, interrogations. Reassured that returning to Franco’s dungeons is no longer possible, Lieutenant Schreiber then plays his card: he tears open the seam of his epaulette where his French military papers are hidden.

  Some time later, transferred to Algiers, he finds Commander Rouvillois from the Fourth Cuirassier Regiment; a living memory from his first campaign, the Battle of France, May–June 1940. Rouvillois is serving in the Fifth African Chasseur Regiment, a regiment commanded by Colonel Desazars de Montgailhard, the man Lieutenant Schreiber had such thunderous arguments with during their imprisonment in Spain. It’s a small world. The colonel claims to know what he’s talking about when it comes to men. Lieutenant Schreiber is reinstated.

  The routine of service begins again: practicing in tanks (no longer the Hotchkiss and Somas of 1940, but instead heavy American Shermans), training in mine clearance techniques, and preparation with the aim of a future landing.

  A “political” incident breaks up the monotony of the days. One evening, Captain Arnaud de Maisonrouge sends Jean-Claude an invitation to dinner from a colonel (we are still in French Algeria). The officers take their places around the beautifully laid table and only Lieutenant Schreiber remains standing behind his chair.

  “Schreiber, are you trying to get taller?” Maisonrouge exclaims. “Sit down!”

  “My captain, there is one man too many among us!”

  Every eye follows his gaze toward a large portrait of Maréchal Pétain. “I was in the Resistance, my captain. I lay rotting in a concentration camp. I will not dine under the eyes of the man who is hunting my comrades in France!” A tense silence. The colonel, conciliatory, takes down the portrait.

  I have heard Jean-Claude recount this Algerian episode often. One has the impression of listening to a story with two strands: the young lieutenant hammering in his refusal while, at the same time, the old storyteller searches for words to express the complexity of what he thinks now about that coarse exchange beneath the Maréchal’s portrait.

  Beyond Wars

  The further away the story gets from the young soldier who defied the Germans on his motorcycle, the more the need for different words—a different language—becomes apparent. From now on, the telegraphic style of the Journal of Marches, dressed up with a few informative anecdotes, is no longer enough for Jean-Claude. His hero, the young Lieutenant Schreiber, has matured significantly in the meantime. He no longer believes that everything can be confined to what he sees playing out before him. The chronicle of his third campaign (August 1944–May 1945) will also be a quest for words that transcend the tragic games of men.

  The memory of his warrior pride is still there, of course. The landing in Provence on August 15, 1944, the taking of Toulon, the rapid ascent through the Rhône in pursuit of German troops, the battles in Burgundy and Alsace, the crossing of the Rhine; he speaks about all of this with the emotion of a young man fully aware that he is participating in a majestic act. Liberation!

  As before, there are some undertakings that are deadlier than others, losses of comrades that mark his memory forever. In a small train station in La Valette-du-Var, his squadron is fired on by an 88 cannon, the tank killer. A shell pierces a tank, and inside, Sergeant Berton and his driver, Francis Gilot, are killed. Gilot was eighteen years old. “Ten out of seventeen tanks destroyed,” the impassive military report will note.

  The war leaves no time for a moment of silence to think of the dead. The next day everyone must take to the roads: Avignon, Uzès, Langogne, Le Puy, Saint-Étienne, Villefranche-sur-Saône, Cluny … 120 miles are covered every day. How many more Oradours was France spared because of the human torrent of that First Army as it advanced, came up against the enemy, drove it back, then launched another assault, losing hundreds and hundreds of young lives every day? The same army that didn’t have a minute to remember a certain Francis Gilot, killed at the age of eighteen on the outskirts of Toulon.

  They have to advance at all costs in order to block off the road from the Reich troops organizing their retreat toward Germany out of Bordeaux and La Rochelle. It is in Haute-Saône, in fact, that Lieutenant Schreiber’s squadron crosses paths with the Oradour executioner, General Fritz von Brodowski, who would later be captured after relentless fighting.

  Today, Jean-Claude is one of the last soldiers able to remember the human particles that were united in that avalanche. Berton, Gilot … yes, he knows their names, and closing his eyes, he can see their faces again and hear the very soft but distinct echo of their voices.

  It is his growing solitude as a witness that causes his way of telling the story to change.

  The war has changed, too, for that matter: during his third campaign, Lieutenant Schreiber sees before him a different enemy. These are no longer the victorious regiments that crossed Europe with the condescending arrogance of a superior race. These were men who had fought in the desert sands and beyond the Arctic Circle, who had known defeats from Stalingrad to Warsaw and who were now fighting with the coarseness and efficiency that comes from long experience in battle. Soldiers for whom the goal of the war was no longer victory but … war.

  A disturbing truth he had never imagined existing before takes shape during the winter months of 1944–1945. Mil
lions of men, he thinks, have spent five years killing their own kind, destroying towns, and massacring women and children. And now these men are withdrawing toward their homeland, three-quarters of which has been razed by bombs, and as they move back they are continuing to kill, destroy, and burn. Soon this insanity will end and everyone will speak of peace; life will start again as if nothing happened. But most significantly, this unnameable madness will find names that will make sense of it: occupation, collaboration, death camps, resistance, liberation, reconstruction … once defined, the insanity will be able to be forgotten in the dust of archives.

  It is a logic that Lieutenant Schreiber refuses to accept.

  Jean-Claude smiles, as if to ask forgiveness for this digression. In telling his story of the war, he must have so often come upon listeners whose faces, in similar moments, would take on expressions that were both sympathetic and annoyed: “Yes … but there’s nothing to be done about it, Jean-Claude. The war was over, everyone had to start living again … and besides, what you call ‘insanity’ is just history. Come on, don’t be so bitter.”

  So, feeling guilty for being such a killjoy, he would pull out another anecdote, just as he is doing now to try and spare me his solemn thoughts.

  “One day, my tank platoon made a stop in the village of Auxey-Duresses in Côte-d’Or. When it was time to leave, I sensed something strange in the way my men were acting. I decided to take a look behind their tanks and discovered a pile of size 75 shells in a ditch. Our ammunition. And inside the tanks, in place of the shells, was a stockpile of bottles of Puligny-Montrachet that a winemaker had offered to the crew. Not without regret, I gave the order to rearm our tanks correctly.”

  I see the cheerfulness of that young tank soldier from 1940 reflected on his face; yes, the “smiling and fearless” kid who was not yet asking himself the painful questions those five years of war would later bring to life.

  He stops speaking, listening to the distant sounds resonating in his memory, then starts again in a voice no longer striving for the irony of a well-told story.

  “It was in Auxey, actually, that I came closer than ever to death. My own was just barely avoided, but as for the death of other people, and the people I was responsible for … I had been informed that the Germans were preparing an attack in our direction and that, squeezed on every side, they could only pass using the road in Auxey. So we had built a roadblock with everything we had on hand: carts, beams, large stones, three or four old plows … all of that topped off with two loads of dynamite. The barricade was held up by two houses at the edge of the town. I put our tanks three hundred yards from there and my men camouflaged them well with branches. When night fell, I went alone to check that what we had built was solid. As I got closer, I heard footsteps and muffled voices on the other side of the roadblock. There could be no doubt: the Germans, already here, were in the process of dismantling the barricade. My tanks were too far away for me to run and protect myself behind them. The German voices went quiet; they had just noticed my presence in spite of the darkness. People say that in situations like that, a second lasts an eternity. That is not how I experienced it. I was very clearly aware that my life was going to end, and … how can I say this? Yes, I experienced a feeling of great serenity, an inexplicable calm: the certainty that this death would be just one brief incident in a far vaster existence. It was this tranquility that allowed me to shout, in a fairly natural manner, ‘Wer da?’ (Who goes there?) From the other side of the roadblock, the answer made itself heard: ‘Deutsche Soldaten!’ I continued speaking German to them, all while rapidly moving backwards. My accent ended up coming out, and by way of reply, I received a burst of submachine gun fire. But I had already taken shelter behind my tank. I shouted, ‘Fire!’ and all of the tanks shot two shells each, and a few seconds later, in the place where the roadblock had been, there was nothing left but a pile of splintered wood and bodies ripped to shreds. With a few wounded—”

  He stops speaking again, no longer attempting to insert an anecdote that would counterbalance this bleak account.

  “What was different about Auxey was … well, for the first time, I had heard the voices of the people I was going to kill. Yes, for a moment I even spoke with them! In a tank, you are separated from the enemy. And it’s also difficult to see very much through the slits in the viewfinder; men always look like silhouettes behind a glass screen. Whereas this time … the human voice is something intimate, and the person who speaks to you and to whom you respond is no longer exactly a stranger. No, Auxey was not a battle like any other. The next day, the Germans brought reinforcements and anti-tank cannons. But we held our ground.”

  History’s Final Word

  The true sense of war is death; this is its substance, its form and its content, its unique specialty, its final product, its trademark. And man’s reason is in no way, alas, contrary to this way of living. It was in Auxey that Lieutenant Schreiber understood the truth that is usually concealed beneath the vibrato of grand patriotic diatribes. It is a truth that is bothersome to the arrogance of our intelligence.

  Could the human world, then, be hopeless? Could hatred be innate and consubstantial with existence? Or would it be enough, perhaps, if one soldier, driven wild by years of battles and suffering, heard the voice of the one opposite him? Or even—at least after the war—if he remembered this voice and not simply the joy of having won the battle where that voice was killed?

  After Auxey, these questions would become the markers, here and there, on Lieutenant Schreiber’s path as a soldier. The battle of Alsace, the taking of Mulhouse, the liberation of Colmar, the murderous fighting in the forest of the Hardt, and the crossing of the Rhine, where every pontoon ramp and both sides of the riverbank were awash with the blood of units who had made it across under the enemy’s machine gun fire and fused shells. Then, the undertaking in the Black Forest that cost so many human lives.

  As if the war has saved what is cruelest for the end, scenes arise that even his eyes, which were no longer quite as sensitive, can hardly bear. The column of enemy soldiers preparing to give themselves up to the Allies. Rather strange men, reinforcements who had been recruited by the Nazis from among the prisoners on the Eastern Front and who have just jumped ship. They walk in rows, followed by a cart filled with human heads, those of their officers: a bargaining chip in exchange for their surrender.

  Then there is the bizarre SS detachment whose soldiers are speaking French! But of course; naturally, it is against his compatriots that Lieutenant Schreiber is forced to fight …

  There is also the tank pierced by shells, one of the five in his platoon. Two members of the crew, Étienne Leper and his driver, Catherineau, manage to extricate themselves, in the snow, amid the shooting and geysers of mud raised by the shells. They crawl toward their lieutenant’s tank. Risking his own life, he successfully gets them to safety and then hoists them into a half-track that evacuates them toward the rear. Leper has an arm torn off. Catherineau’s body is ripped to shreds.

  Sometimes, Jean-Claude interrupts his story with brief rhetorical observations: “Oh, you know, so much has been written about these events,” or even, “What I’m telling you is nothing new.”

  For him, it is not about pretending to be humble, about minimizing the magnitude of the battles in which he took part, or about making less of his comrades’ courage. From this point on, this “après-Auxey” soldier understands that the horrors of war, the large movements of troops, the suffering and the heroism of men—yes, that rapid fusion of history with individual destinies—possess a hidden sense, a new meaning that is beginning to reveal its mystery, one battle at a time, and that the old storyteller of today is trying to express.

  The Words of an Unknown Woman

  This new interpretation of life, one that is both tragic and radiant, is still somewhat unintelligible to him. It reveals itself one April evening on the streets of Baden-Baden.

  The battles to take the city had been bloody, and now as he par
ks his tanks for a few hours of rest, he thinks about the theater of shadows in which humans stage their lives. This place of therapeutic cures and games has been transformed into a battlefield. The streets where not long ago a rich and idle crowd would walk now resound beneath the heavy steps of troops. In the halls where the roulette wheel used to turn, the windows are full of machine guns that have just furiously spat their final blasts. This change in décor has been paid for with thousands of dead men, wounded men, burned men; paid for by the death of that foot soldier the lieutenant saw fall down earlier, his face striking the muddy ground.

  Behind these unsteady realities he feels the presence of another reality entirely, a life that would make this atrocious merry-go-round of history unnecessary.

  He crosses a plaza, stops, raises his head. On the second floor of a building he catches someone’s quick smile—a young woman who, after all the shooting, is happy to be able to open her window and breathe the air that, through the exhaust of tanks and trucks, smells powerfully of spring. The lieutenant, like all of his comrades, is walking down the street looking for a place to stay the night. He knocks on the door to the house, the young woman opens it, and he introduces himself, explaining in German his situation as a “homeless” officer. She invites him to come in, pointing out that “unfortunately, my apartment is very small, just a dining room and a bedroom …”