by Leon Werth
We share our meal with a policeman. He had been sitting on the grass. He was coming by bicycle from I don’t know where, going I don’t know where. We exchange a few words about the current mess. He concludes: “When you see things like this, you ask yourself whether …”
And he says no more about it. But the worst of circumstances cannot stifle the genius of those who know how to use people and events in the right combinations. A driver, one of thousands in this bloated caravan, approaches the policeman and says to him, “This can’t continue … It’s a disgrace … There is no police presence … If you like, I’ll load your bicycle onto my car; get on the running board and you can unsnarl the column of traffic.”
The policeman accepts and the car drives off alongside the line, passing by like a command car and disregarding the caravan.
A group on the grass, beside a small van, is lunching on canned food. The tone, the accent reek of Paris, or rather the Paris suburbs. A woman in her fifties is very agitated and no longer knows how to speak without shouting. Her words contain all the contradictions of the suburbs and of history itself: “The Germans are people like us. I can never be made to say that the war isn’t crap … Neither we nor the English are little saints … remember how the English treated the Boers … That doesn’t stop me from having wept when I learned that the Germans were in Paris …”
On the road, the traffic jam hasn’t eased. Two-wheeled carts, cars lined up for three hundred kilometers with no one directing traffic. But yes … there is a police presence, a sergeant. I’ve never seen brutish like this braying, gangly brute. I don’t know whether he’s drunk with fright or power. He shouts “To the right” at drivers whose cars are in the roadside ditch. He flings himself into a momentarily empty car, starts the engine, tries to put it into first gear and cannot because he is pushing the accelerator to the floor. By making the gears screech, he imagined he would unsnarl traffic on the road. He abandons the car and attempts to reestablish order generally with another local expedient. A peasant cart driven by a young girl is not completely on the right-hand side of the road. He doesn’t give the girl time to turn her horse. He lunges at the animal’s head, seizes the rein and pulls on the bit brutally, stunning the horse, frightening the girl and managing to move the cart only a few centimeters to the right.
Then he disappears. This kind of man is no fan of danger. Indeed some airplanes are passing overhead; they drop bombs and fire their machine guns. People lie down in the roadside ditches, hide in the woods or cling to trees in the farmyard. Some children grab their mothers’ skirts; the women circle the trees and hide their faces in their arms, like a boy avoiding a slap.
I make out the corduroy pants of a wagoner hiding beneath his wagon. I study their color and the ribbing. My longstanding desire for corduroy pants to wear in the country has reached its climax.
The airplanes have disappeared. We learn that the farmhouse cellar contains two barrels of cider and a cask of eau de vie. So a veritable resupply operation is organized. Those carrying empty bottles cross paths on the lawn with those carrying full bottles. It looks like a labor requisition.
A magnificent procession enters the courtyard: wagons pulled by trains of horses, carts hitched to four or six oxen. But these carts and wagons were not loaded with a miscellaneous freight of mattresses, hay and bicycles like the carts in the caravan. They parade in as if for an agricultural fair, they parade in like the Merovingian chariots of feudal kings in old history textbooks. This impressive procession belongs to the M. family, which owns, it’s said, thousands of hectares in the Beauce. It is led by two booted horsemen on sport horses. I didn’t know whether they were the owners or the managers of the abandoned estate.
Some drivers, immobilized by lack of gasoline, are begging them for a tow. Nothing could have been easier. Their wagons are very lightly loaded and some are pulled by six oxen, as I mentioned. But they refuse with a disingenuous reluctance, they refuse without saying no, they refuse politely but without warmth. They had a calf slaughtered for them and their drivers, but they weren’t concerned about children who for three days have been fed nothing but a little curdled milk.
Fatigue and despondency are keeping us in this somber courtyard. Evening is coming. We have traveled four kilometers since morning. We should go on nonetheless, go somewhere. It appears that the caravan is being directed toward Gien. From Gien, heading east, we could no doubt get to Auxerre, Avallon. But I’m nearly out of gasoline. There’s only one solution left: being towed by a truck or horse cart. We would travel as quickly and more surely than if the motor were running. But it’s not easy. Many cars are already going in pairs. The military trucks are no longer towing civilian vehicles, as they had the first few days. The peasants’ carts are fully loaded with people and things, and their horses couldn’t pull anything more. And the cart drivers are reluctant to stop to hitch up: they don’t want to lose their place in the crowd.
A dazed, sleepy old man perched high on the seat of an uncovered flatbed cart that is barely loaded agrees to stop. We offer him 500 francs to tow us as far as Gien. He accepts. He brings his rig into the courtyard. To tie up the car, I solicit the help of a peasant. He’s Polish. Where is he coming from? He leaves the bridle of his horse with his wife and very skillfully knots the old rope I hand him. He refuses any tip forcefully and with real dignity.
There’s nothing left but to set off. We water the horse. We give him some fodder. We watch the horse’s meal respectfully, like watching the meal of a lord. The horse is not very docile. “Understand,” his master tells me, “it’s not that he’s mean, but he is crazy. And I don’t know how to drive horses … This horse belongs to my son, who is a scrap-iron dealer … And my son told me to take the horse to Carcassone.”
I assume that once he is on the road, the horse will follow the line. But before the roadway there’s a ditch on the right that worries me and does not seem to worry the old man on his seat. Nevertheless, the horse, the cart and the car get under way. This horse is crazy, but he’s courageous. Here we are en route, in line. We travel some hundred meters in the dark. I’ve rarely felt such contentment at the wheel of a car. But the caravan stops. Restarting, the rope breaks. I call out in the dark for the old man to stop his horse. We reattach the rope; it breaks again. But this time the old man, who is asleep on his seat, doesn’t hear me. I never saw him again.
I can hardly expect to continue on my own. At this speed the radiator is sure to boil over. I leave the car to my wife and Andrée F.* I stretch out in the field; the caravan passes by like a nightmare. I fall asleep.
I’m woken. Some soldiers, sent from Lorris no doubt by some vague police authority, want to push my car to the shoulder. I sit at the wheel. They push so hard that had I not violently hit the brakes, I’d have gone into the ditch.
The car is stopped halfway on the grass and halfway on the edge of the shoulder. Because of the shoulder and the wheels buried in the grass, my wife and Andrée F. won’t be able to move the car. Plus it’s nighttime, the cars in the caravan are blind, which is to say it’s impossible to catch the attention of a driver, to kindle the slightest innate sympathy, the slightest wish to help.
The caravan to our left stops. I plead with the driver of a cart who is holding his horse by the bridle to tow me at least up onto the roadway. He hesitates, he parleys with his wife, who is driving the following cart. But in the meantime he entrusts me with his horse. I take the bridle. But this enormous beast will not stop lifting its muzzle toward the sky. “He’s not mean; he’s stupid,” the peasant told me. I’m unlucky: the other horse was crazy; this one is stupid. Even though I’m very scared of the horse, I remain bravely at my post, I stay for a long time. It’s one way to woo the farmer, who’ll perhaps agree to help me. He returns. I understand clearly that he would like nothing more than to help me. But his wife does not want to. Standing in her cart, she invokes the Loire, the Loire that they must reach in order to at last be safe from all harm.
For
the Loire is now the desired goal, fluvial and strategic, that the collective soul of the caravan has set for itself. “The moment we cross the Loire, we’ll calm down …” a peasant woman said. It seems all the peasant women in France had taken courses at the War College.
Dawn is breaking. We left Paris seven days ago. Two young men, mechanics, free me from my grassy slope. A wagoner driving a tumbrel harnessed to two horses agrees to tow me. Since Montereau the landscape has seemed featureless to us, sparse, faded, miserable. Maybe it was the effect of our fatigue, of our interrupted sleep.
Our wagoner stops his horses. He has seen a dead horse in a meadow. Calmly, taking his time, as if he were at a blacksmith’s, he removes its horseshoes. This wagoner may not know war, but he knows the road and he knows horses. He’s in no rush. Neither are we. We are sleepy.
But the caravan, until then patient, is now aggressive, shaking with fear, mistrust and hatred. The motorists complain that the horse-cart drivers are slowing progress; the horse-cart drivers criticize the motorists for thinking they have the right to do anything, “and yet it is we who provide you with food …”
The caravan is inhabited by two moral entities called the Loire and the fifth column. The Loire is the guardian angel that awaits some thirty kilometers away. The fifth column is the free-floating entity, a detestable divinity that incarnates and disincarnates, appearing and disappearing ten times in five minutes. The fifth column is everything (beings and objects), everything that stands between the refugees and the Loire. The fifth column is the frenzy of intolerance in this once-sedentary population suddenly become nomads.
The caravan has stopped among meadows that rise upward toward a horizon of thin woods, that rise on dreary slopes like the oblique planes of some elementary geometry. Some automobiles, in order to overtake, are crossing the fields. Everything is bottlenecked. A refugee, sweating, with a lost look in his eyes, runs alongside the caravan, his briefcase in hand, shouting to us as he passes, “It’s too much, they called me a spy.”
Behind us a sort of emaciated, disheveled sibyl prophesizes in obscure terms. My wife approaches to put some questions to her. She replies, “I beg you to go your own way … I have nothing to say to you and you well know it. Take your precautions as I have my safeguards. I know what is and what it’s all about … You know better than I where you come from and what your obligations are. I ask you to make way.”
Otherwise, these people aren’t crazy enough to invoke tutelary deities and beasts of the apocalypse. Everything since Paris is inexplicable by the laws of reason. We are made to take roundabout routes, to trace gyrating kilometers around towns and forests in order to leave the highways to military convoys. Nonetheless, we are constantly mixed together with military convoys … We even wonder why the enemy aircraft bomb and strafe so moderately. Perhaps because bombing, in halting a section of the caravan, would take the place of the absent traffic police, reducing the congestion, disorder and chaos. This free-for-all is so total, so enduring, so absolute that it cannot be entirely attributable to our headquarters no matter how unstrung it might be, nor to the planning of enemy spies, however numerous or organized they might be.
I’m sleepy. Hundreds of thousands of evacuees, of refugees, driven out by the authorities or departing voluntarily, hundreds of thousands of impromptu nomads are sleepy like me. I proceed, towed by the tumbrel’s two monumental horses. I have never seen such a landscape, a landscape of ashes. It is vast, spare and pathetically macabre. I hesitate to use the word macabre, which forcefully implies something horrible, something emphatic of death. Maybe it’s the tree limbs, not pallid and limp but rather etched in spindly lines. It’s nothing but a field, the dreariest of all the fields in the world. Two immobile horses gaze out at the road, meditating rather, taking in the endless line of traffic that no longer surprises but still hypnotizes them. One of the two, upright on its four hooves, its harness tied to a tree, is dead.
The tumbrel moves on, pulling us along for three or four kilometers. (I can say that today, having consulted a map.) And we are three or four kilometers from Ouzouer-sur-Loire. But I no longer reckon distance in kilometers nor time in hours. I perceive only alternations between immobility and movement, between day and night.
At a bend in the road surrounded by brush fifty meters from an isolated house, we stop again. My wife and Andrée F. get out of the car to relax and, without much hope, to ask the inhabitants of the house whether any bread or milk might be found. I stay behind alone, resting against the steering wheel, enjoying the silence. Evening is falling; the light is sad and soft. I don’t know whether I’m drowsy or meditating. Suddenly there’s a crackle of machine-gun fire. I don’t know exactly where it’s coming from. It is nearby and raking the ground. Every note of this symphony of clacks is distinct despite the speed of its cadence; each has its full resonance. It was as if the entire space had contracted to a single point and exploded into clatter. I see nothing but the back of the tumbrel and the empty roadway. I don’t have time to contemplate for long. Mortar rounds coming from I don’t know where are exploding I don’t know where. The lead carthorse I’m attached to rears; the second does the same out of politeness. And with that, they bolt. Should I confess that in an instant I forgot about my wife and Andrée F.? My shock at the first bursts of machine-gun fire was no doubt fear. But I’m no longer afraid. I’m being pulled by a force over which I have no control, to which I am, what can I say? directly tied, attached by a rope. It was so unexpected and quick that I hadn’t time to feel afraid. It was irresistible, like a fall from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame must be. And, it must be said, the exodus had been dull, like trench warfare was, dull and monotonous. In the trenches in 1914, boredom predominated over death. I’m aware of the simplistic lyricism of this, which resembles a battle painting and those games children invent, when they tie improvised wagons and chariots together. All the more so as the first horse, its front hooves seeming so light suspended in the air, rears with an enthusiasm inspired by historic paintings and equestrian sculptures. He’s not rearing anymore; he’s galloping. We’re flying. It has been a long time since I moved so fast. I feel as if I’m part of some cavalry charge in the battle of Reichshoffen.
My natural caution kept me from relishing the frenzy for long. I steered the car into the last vehicle of a stopped column. My front fenders locked with its back fenders. Dead stop. The rope had broken.
Ahead of me the wagon was moving at great speed. It plunged into the roadside ditch and I saw the lead horse lying on its side at the edge of the roadway.
I get out of the car, whose front end is pinned. Behind the car, a dead horse. It is one of an artillery van’s horses that, without my hearing or feeling it, had collapsed, smashing and partly ripping away a fender. When, how had it fallen? I don’t know. What projectile had hit it? I have no idea. Its head lies on the road, jutting toward the middle, where a trickle of blood is spreading. The car cannot be accessed by someone coming from the farmhouse without stepping over the horse’s head.
My wife and Andrée F. had barely left the car when German soldiers lined the roadway and, firing at the machine gunner, closed the road to Lorris to the French artillerymen and the civilians mixed in with them. The two women take cover in a field where two Germans are extending the line of riflemen. One of the two stops firing and signals the women to take shelter in a little wood at the left of the field. And he says to the other in French, yes, in French, and quite good French: “Don’t shoot … there are too many women and children …”
But the little wood is far. The two women run as far as a ditch where some people, women and children, are already crouching. Two other women, as if reciting litanies in a chapel, endlessly repeat aloud, “Saint Christopher … pray for us.” An artilleryman hides himself among the crouching and kneeling civilians. But the ditch isn’t very deep. Their backs are exposed. My wife and Andrée F. take cover beneath a small van. But their legs are exposed, and they feel stones, as if fired from a sl
ingshot, ricocheting at their feet. My wife feels a burning in her calf. It’s no more than a small, bleeding wound, where a sliver of metal has lodged. But two artillery horses are down, and their bodies, screening the bottom of the little van, are protecting my wife and Andrée F. from gunfire.
That was in the space of a few minutes. My wife is worried about me. She is sure that, dragged by the horses, I have been crushed beneath the car. Andrée F. quickly reassures her.
My wife emerges, crawling. Night has fallen. In the darkness some of the wounded are collected; they are helped into automobiles and carts, which make U-turns and speed off in the direction of Lorris.
The Germans are still shooting, but they don’t seem to be aiming at the space between the road and the farm. A French artilleryman, wounded in the leg, is limping, leaning on my wife’s shoulder, toward the farmhouse.
I don’t know how we found each other again, near the car. We have just sat down when some Germans appear, Indian file, in helmets and armed with machine guns. They are coming not from the direction of Lorris, which is to say from Paris, but from the direction of Ouzouer, which is to say from the Loire. Not only had they caught up with us, but they had also passed us and were doubling back. They had simply overtaken us by traveling through the woods.
They are walking five meters apart. They pass near the car. Never during the war of 1914 had I seen Germans from this close except as prisoners. None are the fleshy German type, grossly made. They look at us while passing. We look at them, too. Later, my wife said to me, “I couldn’t believe they were Germans; they looked like Japanese fighters to me …” This poetic logic was accurate. Their features are contorted, taut. Their wincing makes them look Asian below the helmet. This is understandable. They are afraid, and they push on. This mixture of worry and resolve is, strictly speaking, military courage. They push on, and nothing impedes them. They are no doubt as astonished about it as I am. They are no doubt expecting some trap. They number no more than about thirty. The column halts. One of the soldiers stops in front of the car door. His face becomes visible, framed by the window. This face-to-face, this proximity, is uncomfortable. And this discomfort goes beyond worry or fear. I have the urge to kill this man, or to talk to him about the weather or his health. My wife murmured a few words I don’t recall, to ward off silence, or death. Rather stupidly I tell her, “This man has no desire to kill us.” For a few seconds the three of us form a group at the margins of the war. Perhaps even some fleeting sympathy passed between him and us like a ripple on water. And it seemed to me that the shadow of a smile glided across his clenched features.