33 Days

by Leon Werth

  Guarded by two German soldiers, a number of civilians are assembled on the roadside. Their hands are in the air. On a signal by the Germans, their arms are lowered. But a young man with a mournful face obstinately raises his arms higher with a distorted gymnastic motion, his open palms facing the sky. No doubt he’s thinking that an excess of caution can’t hurt, and no doubt he’s afraid lest the Germans imagine he has decided to die fighting. It’s sad and funny. At last, one of the soldiers, his hand exaggeratedly patting the air, reassures him: “Enough … enough.”

  A few women are gathered between the front of the farmhouse and an impassable line of two helmeted Germans. Perhaps the women can no longer bear their mute, paralyzing fear, their anxiety over a danger no longer associated with noise. As for what comes next, I can’t pretend to explain, only recount. At this moment, the women raise their arms. I don’t know whether they conferred or whether the cry rises spontaneously from their throats. At any rate, they are whimpering more than shouting: “Search us! Search us!”

  Do they mean to say that they are not hiding any guns under their skirts; are they offering the conqueror the money or jewelry they’re carrying to appease him? Is it a simple plea, a cry to ward off evil?

  One of the Germans regards them coldly and says in French, “You are female prisoners … you will be subject to the same fate as German women …”

  This “you will be subject to the same fate” has something solemn, ridiculous, like a grammar exercise. And its meaning seems obscure to me. Are these peasant women being threatened with harsh Germanic discipline or are they being reassured, persuaded that German women are not so unhappy after all?

  Fifty meters on, toward Ouzouer, some French artillerymen are gathered close together forming a human bundle, an opaque and shapeless mass.

  The women huddled against the farmhouse wall yell to them, “Surrender! Surrender! There are children.” An unnecessary request. All at once, as much by clear decision as from fear, they raise their hands.

  I don’t value military courage much, but I felt shame. This was the only time, in my whole life I believe, that I felt a personal military passion, a desire to fight.

  I am recounting what I saw and what I felt. I’m not attempting a historical reconstruction or an after-the-fact narrative, coherent and critical, of military operations. At these moments I knew nothing about the whole in which this incident has its place. Watching from the farmhouse wall, believing myself to be a prisoner, I couldn’t even tell whether those artillerymen who had so little fight in them gathered there like a troop of lost dogs, whether any officer were with them, whether they even form a military unit. I don’t know whether the nomadic infantrymen on the roadsides and the fragmented artillery convoys hadn’t received an order or an example that, in plain language, could only be translated as, “Bolt whenever you want, whenever you can, and block up the Loiret …”

  The Germans and the artillerymen prisoners have hardly left when a few horse-drawn French artillery caissons arrive. A hidden unit of Germans fires on the convoy. The towrope of a gun carriage at the end of the convoy comes undone, the caisson teeters then falls into the roadside ditch. An artilleryman runs to the horses’ heads, others put their shoulders to the wheels. An officer takes the place of the man holding the bridle, lifts the head of one of the horses and gives it some support using the bit. All this under fire.

  But the women near the farmhouse wall, as they did earlier, shout at the officer and his men, “Surrender! Surrender!”

  “We have nothing to do with civilians …,” the officer, a young lieutenant, responds.

  The women are shouting, but their shouting is only a lament. Their fear, a tantrum of fear, makes them shout and prompts this extraordinary ellipsis: “Cowards … cowards … surrender.”

  The men are leaning into the wheels, bracing themselves against the ground; the horse rears one last time convulsively, comes down again and, exhausted or hit by a bullet, collapses on its side. Only then do the artillerymen abandon the effort; that’s how, that night, honor was preserved.

  It’s now pitch-dark. The officer and the artillerymen approach the farm. I was told that an old peasant embraced them.

  The officer asks us where the Germans came from and in which direction they left. They’re nowhere to be seen. They hid in the woods and advanced toward Ouzouer.

  Despite the darkness, I make out the handsome features of a firm, kind face. I was concentrating only on giving him information, but I too wanted to embrace that young man, who may have already known that all was lost but who wanted to lose nobly.

  I have recounted these events piecemeal, disconnected from each other. A little more geography perhaps might have made it clearer, but more like a report, slowing down and further distorting the narrative. It would have been clearer still if I took into account what we discovered later: that is to say, that the Germans knew the terrain perfectly, as well as the size, route and distribution of our convoys. Moreover, a raw transcription of events is impossible. Event, emotion and opinion comingle. However faithful a report might be, it gives a beginning and end to what has neither, and transforms it into theater. It explains and rationalizes an event that is accompanied by neither commentary nor explanation and has no concern for rational justifications.

  When the shooting stopped, when the evening silence came, I felt a sort of absurd satisfaction. During the 1914 war, during months in the trenches, I saw nothing that as much resembled war as it appears in legends and images.

  Today I have difficulty imagining what we understood of the military situation, the distance we assumed was between the bulk of enemy troops and us. I think we very much believed in a vanguard of motorcyclists or even parachutists, dispatched like cavalry scouts in the old days. The way at the beginning of the 1914 war we had seen innocuous patrols of uhlans. We had no idea whatsoever of the total breakdown of French forces. We assumed they were awaiting the enemy on the far bank of the Loire. And all the convoys that had overtaken us could only have one mission: to reinforce resistance at the Loire.

  Witnesses to the unbelievable chaos, we were not assessing its effects. This exodus, this mélange of soldiers and civilians, city people and peasants, suddenly appeared before us like the acute stage of an illness, like a storm. An absurd hope was born from a no less absurd, almost instinctive logic, from a bizarre denial of the evidence. It was impossible that nothing had been planned for the end point of this rout. This rout was itself proof that the high command had taken other measures. Its negligence here was proof of its vigilance elsewhere. And who knows whether the Germans, who were gaining on us, who were at our heels, had not been pulled into a trap? Perhaps they would be taken prisoner? We were convinced that we could be captured, but not France.

  We enter the farmhouse. It is filled with an unrelated group of people: apparently peasants and city people traveling on foot, caught in the violence. The farm is abandoned; its inhabitants have left. Some old people are seated on a bench behind a table. On a bed in the back a wounded soldier is laid out; he had been hit in the arm and near the heart. He’s bleeding. He’s not responding to questions. It’s unclear whether he is about to die. An old woman, an octogenarian at least, sitting on a chair in a corner, thinks only of getting up to go for a little walk along the road. Her family watches over her with indulgence and firmness. She rises halfway and points out to me the wounded man on the bed, which is obscured by people wandering around the room: “I would like to know how that young man is doing …” I find a spot on the bench, lean my elbows on the table and sleep.

  It’s impossible to think of leaving in the pitch dark. It’s impossible to sleep in this crowd. We decide to rest in the hayloft, which can be reached by a ladder. The hayloft is cement and contains neither hay nor straw. No matter. To lie down is a luxury. But at the other end of the loft an old woman, in a voice both furious and monotonous, is shouting insults and reproaches at her daughter-in-law and son, endlessly, without pause.

&nbs
p; Between night and dawn we decide to set off, and we leave the hayloft.

  The car is trapped between the dead artillery-wagon horse and the rear end of another automobile, which is enmeshed with another, which is similarly wedged in, and so on for two hundred meters. Even if I succeed in extricating it from this inextricable line, we won’t go far, the gas tank is nearly empty. A bicyclist is shivering in his shirtsleeves and asks whether we couldn’t give him a jacket or covering. We have only a white woolen blanket. He puts it over his shoulders and leaves on foot, bent over his machine, looking like a ghost.

  We deliberate in this sooty dawn, next to the dead horse, which is now scarcely more to us than an embankment or a mile marker. We quickly decide to continue on foot. That means opening all the suitcases and gathering a little clothing in the smallest. As a household move, it’s complicated. Like all men, I’m a coward when faced with moving house. I lose interest. I have only one concern, which is to bring Terre des hommes. Not because it is a luxury edition—I have little regard for beautiful editions—but because Saint-Exupéry gave it to me, because the beautiful paper, the uncut pages, aren’t sumptuousness and vanity but friendship. Because Saint-Exupéry wrote in it, in his ethereal handwriting, a few words with which my friendship refreshes itself as if at a spring, a few words I would be proud of, were friendship not above pride.

  I owe Terre des hommes as much worry as joy. When I had to ask for shelter, I entrusted my copy to the host, who hid it on the highest shelf of an armoire under a pile of sheets. Later, having thought about it, and believing I’d be able to get back on the road, I thought it would be safer if I took it with me. Unable to leave, I entrusted it to my host again; then I took it back. Saint-Ex, how you complicated our exodus!

  If we have to abandon the car, we’ll abandon it farther on. In either case, it will be ransacked. Might as well use every last drop of gasoline. I can’t recall how we freed it. But a man got up on the running board and helped us. His wife and their five children disappeared the evening before, during the battle. He started out with two families who were friends; the drivers of both cars had disappeared.

  Yesterday’s fight cleared the road. We’re moving freely. All I remember is a peasant screaming and rolling on the ground; a man was trying to restrain him. We arrive at Ouzouer. But in the middle of the town the road is riddled with holes from mortars and is impassable. We turn onto a byroad that also leads to Gien, the Gien bridge and the Loire, which is stopping the enemy armies.

  I’ve said little or nothing about the cars abandoned by the roadside, in the roadside ditch, upright or on their sides. So I have not given an accurate image of a landscape strewn with automobiles, like a wasteland strewn with tin cans. I’ve also said nothing about those who abandoned them. But from a distance I won’t affect a pity that I no longer felt at the time and that had turned into cold observation. Men, women and children had become pedestrians. It was nothing more than a change in classification, as irrelevant as troop movements. I had acquired the indifference of a soldier or emigrant.

  Past Ouzouer, carts and automobiles are returning toward Ouzouer and Lorris, that is, heading away from the Loire. People are shouting to us that the Loire can no longer be crossed and that the Gien bridge had blown up.

  My wife decides to cross the Loire at all costs, no matter how, by swimming if need be. I admire her for still planning and for aspiring to influence fate. Everything seems so absolutely incoherent to me that it no longer seems possible to bring any rational calculus or human volition to bear.

  The countryside is bare and seems uninhabited. We see only deserters, nomads. This area is just a desert track.

  An airplane passes overhead and strafes by approximation, none too insistently. People flee into the roadside ditch and the woods.

  A whimpering man in his fifties, a doctor from near Paris, abandoned his car for lack of gasoline. He brought neither suitcase nor knapsack nor bundle. There is a consolation in desperation, which is to part with everything, to be reduced to oneself. He’s not losing his misery in the misery of others. He takes refuge in his; he takes refuge in his complaints, in his tears. He is alone; he’s wandering straight ahead. Even so, he’s whining about having left behind I don’t recall what book. It’s touching and a little comic, for as I remember it was over one of those “deluxe” editions, with cheap illustrations, that were mass-produced after the 1914 war.

  I had reassured two peasant women with a young girl coming from who knows where. I had told them, knowing nothing and completely at random, that we had little chance of being hit by bullets from an airplane. We tell each other our misfortunes. They suggest we take shelter with them in a certain abandoned farmhouse well away from the road. The Germans won’t think to go there. We’ll live there “while waiting.” There are beds and, in a field next to the house, hay and potatoes. Chickens are still pecking in the farmyard and a cow, fussing in the meadow, wants only to be looked after.

  Many people lived that way, for days and days. It was not an absurd plan. But the Germans neglected neither winding country roads nor isolated houses. The idea of a rustic life away from the flood of refugees tempts me. But we wanted to cross the Loire.

  My wife learns from an old peasant that nearby is a mill and a ferryman. Our decision is made. We’ll beg the miller to look after the car and we’ll cross with three small suitcases, which we will make as light as possible, since afterwards we must travel by foot.

  * The Werths’ son’s nanny.

  III

  LES DOUCIERS.

  FIFTH COLUMN

  The peasant was an Arab storyteller. On his directions, five hundred meters from the Loire we find a sandy courtyard and a low house. There is indeed an old mill not far away, but nothing had been milled in it for a long time. The ferryman, there since the day before, is a refugee from Paris who had taken a few soldiers across the Loire.

  I learn this from a very brunette, slightly reticent woman who makes little faces while speaking. The house belongs to her. Her husband stayed in Courbevoie, where he manages a factory. Their apartment was bombed; the bombs did significant damage to it, in particular shattering windowpanes that cost 4,000 francs each. It’s true that a man from Paris, who is an acquaintance of hers, ferried some soldiers across and will perhaps consent to take us across as well. She agrees to lend one of her rowboats provided that the other, which a refugee left on the opposite side of the river, can be brought back, because each of these boats is worth 3,500 francs, “and thirty-five hundred francs is not a sum one throws into the Loire.”

  I also learn that two soldiers borrowed a ladder to cross the Loire. They got into the water holding onto the uprights. But one of them drowned.

  I admired the blossoms of some rosebushes planted in front of the house on the other side of the courtyard. I genuinely admire them but say so also to be attentive, for I’m the guest, the supplicant. I learn that they grow thanks only to the care of an old gardener, a nice old man, but one who works very slowly and to whom she pays seven francs an hour.

  I am, I admit, a little irritated by this numerical evaluation of every object, by this transcribing of the world into prices. It seems too simplistic to me to see only vulgarity and a poor education here. This is irresistible and persistent, like a tic; I think it must be some sort of disease.

  Moreover, Madame Soutreux’s welcome has a tense, mannered kindness, a kindness without warmth. But after all, by what right could we demand that she give us her heart? She isn’t refusing us access to her courtyard. She will introduce us to the mysterious, benevolent ferryman; she agrees that we can leave our car in her yard provided, of course, it won’t be for too long (this goes without saying and seems fair). She also agrees to watch over a few things that are precious to us.

  Besides, it is she who holds the secret of the Loire; she is the goddess of the Loire. And we wish to cross the Loire at all costs. To cross the Loire, I’m prepared for any concession, any indulgence. That is why I offer to swim acro
ss the river to fetch the 3,500-franc rowboat still on the other shore.

  We ready our bundles for the crossing and for our new journey on foot.

  But an artillery duel begins over our heads. The French mortar shells fall near Ouzouer and the Germans’ shells hit the evacuated villages on the other side of the river. A rocket lands in the courtyard.

  We no longer think of crossing the Loire.

  Madame Soutreux offers hospitality. She gives us permission to stay in her courtyard and sleep in the car.

  We are strangers. We appeared suddenly at this house, far from the main road, reachable only by a crude, rutted track. It is an ancient farmhouse consisting of a ground floor, level with the courtyard, and a shed topped by a hayloft. Its transformation into a Sunday pied-à-terre for Parisians is very recent. Only a single room has been furnished, which Madame Soutreux uses as both a dining room and a bedroom. The walls of the other rooms have not yet been papered and the doors not yet painted. In one of the rooms there is a bed frame.

  Madame Soutreux does not inhabit this vast, barely furnished house alone. People are moving around the courtyard and inside the house who seem familiar with the place and “fully authorized.” The most mediocre observer would grasp immediately that they form a temporary group and that they are strangely dissimilar. Some are nearly unclassifiable. The majority of novelists rely on a base of stable, well-defined mores. Their characters move toward or away from the customary. But in France since 1914, prejudices have weakened as much as their premises. Mores and social relationships have lost all solidity. Weak personalities have become incoherent, and this very incoherence lends them an apparent originality.