33 Days

by Leon Werth

  We set off again. A hundred meters down the road we discover a house. A game warden was housed here before the evacuation of the area. It’s now inhabited by a young blond giant, his wife and their seven children. The mother is petite and sweet-tempered. The oldest of the children is not yet fourteen. They play on the grass, in the sun, all of them in shorts or bathing suits. They’re not the haggard, pitiful refugees that we left the day before. In fact, they did not wind up here by accident. The father knew the area, the house. He chose this refuge.

  We ate the canned monkey. And some peas picked from an abandoned garden. They were good people; all they could give us without depriving the children, they gave us … Even a little bread, even some salt, even some wine, even some coffee. And good-heartedly. We’re five adults. As for the baby, its mother had brought a box of baby cereal and made it some porridge.

  A few stray soldiers come to draw water from the well. One asks for a pan from the kitchen, another a spout to tap a barrel of beer. And he tells us in passing that there is “eine andere Regierung”§ in Paris. He’s very large, his eyes very small, his eyelids swollen. I understand what he says; it’s simple, like the grammar exercises in secondary school: “Yesterday the French killed three German soldiers …” But it’s impossible for me to grasp whether he is angry, sad or indignant. I have more the feeling that he is reproaching me for a violation of the rules. What a bizarre idea, killing German soldiers!

  On the road a hundred meters from us, a regiment is marching, a rectangle on the roadway. If someone said to me, “The road is weeping,” I would have believed it. I’m weeping for France, in this landscape I’m unfamiliar with, that I have not learned to love, a flat landscape with too much sky.

  For dinner we had a gruel made of sorrel and bits of a loaf of bread found in the woods. We slept on straw in a tin-roofed shack. Throughout the night we heard the rumble of German trucks and raucous commands. Hitler was taking possession of France.

  I was asleep, then woke up with a start. I thought it was the sound of machine guns. It was only duck calls. How beautiful duck calls are! Completely peaceful. I hadn’t realized till that point how much I loved duck calls … But there is no longer peace on earth. I’m trapped, surrounded, strangled by war and by this peace that will be even more like war than the previous war was. Why, yesterday, did none of us dare go near two pails filled with green beans? Two full pails that the Germans had left in the yard. The dogs ate them.

  We spent the following day there. Why? I can hardly say. “To see how things will turn out, because it’s more prudent to wait …”

  Our host, a sometime pharmacist in a small town in the Nord and sometime pharmacist’s assistant at a big firm in Paris, more resembles a Quaker than someone who sells ear drops. His philosophy, his politics, I relate without commentary. “France has been punished and deserved it. But England will save itself and save us. Providence will abandon neither France nor England.”

  He guesses that I don’t quite believe in Providence and interrupts his general theme to point out to me more specifically the evidence of divine intervention.

  “There are many, it has been proved, who passed through machine-gun fire with a simple little insignificant prayer.”

  And he resumes his theme of France saved. “France will pick herself up again, because after the war there will no longer be money to pay schoolteachers and members of parliament.”

  For two days we’ve been free of the carnival maniac and the lady of the manor with her 4,000-franc windowpanes who guzzles champagne with Germans. And we’ve felt real relief. Nevertheless, we have to return to her house. It’s our only refuge. We cross through a thicket; the sun shines through the branches and the ground is crimson. All this had been protected from the war. For a moment the world can be reduced to the contemplation of this brushwood. I recall that in a trench in 1915, as I was peeling an orange the fruit seemed to me as if it had been protected by its rind from the war, from the filth of the war, as if it were the only pure thing on earth, the only thing the war hadn’t touched.

  The Germans are occupying the Soutreux woman’s house, the fields, the woods toward the Loire, the woods on the other side of the road. The courtyard is full of them.

  I repeat to myself stupidly, “I’m no longer in France …” It’s true that they seem to be at home. The soldiers that we had seen at the mystical pharmacist’s house had a certain humane tentativeness, they were alone, tourists lost in the countryside; they weren’t filled with the pride of a victorious army. But the ones here are a combat unit. They exhibit a deliberate, contemptuous insolence. Or rather, when passing by they ignore us, they make us insignificant. Or they’re trying to offend us, to humiliate us. A Feldwebelǁ yells over our heads to his men in pidgin French, “Tomorrow big parade in Paris …”

  I realize that I had not yet admitted the completeness of the defeat. I was thinking of it like a disease one fears and deep down dismisses as impossible. Each of these Germans is the symptom of a disease whose description we had read about but are suddenly discovering on our skins.

  A few soldiers are stretched out on folding chairs, as if showing us the bliss and ease of the victory. Could this be simply the effect of my exasperation? Would French soldiers on maneuvers be different? Less oafish, I think, and less childish. Two soldiers are playing with a ball; another, like a kid, rides a bicycle in circles around the courtyard with incredible perseverance.

  Soutreux welcomes us very politely. She was very worried about us, she says. She offers to let us sleep on the straw in one of the bedrooms, the only one not occupied by Germans. We slept, separated from them by a thin wall. In the morning, they leave. There was no commotion of departure. We heard a command; they all got up at once, as if they were marching in close order on parade.

  The courtyard is free of them. We breathe. It’s as if all of France were rid of them.

  Lerouchon’s niece comes over to us. “It’s boring,” she tells us. “Now that they’re no longer here, it’s too quiet.”

  I found a piece of German bread in the woods. I was alone. No one saw me. I ate it.

  The roads are a mess: there are motorbikes, bicycle wheels, tin cans, shirts, undershorts, German magazines. I lean over a strange box that resembles a toy chest. It’s a French military telegraph set.

  The two nearest farmhouses have been abandoned by their inhabitants and occupied by the Germans for the last two days. They’ve been ransacked, the dresser drawers emptied. Whatever didn’t seem worth carrying off has been dumped on the ground. Underfoot are a wreath of orange blossoms and some framed photographs. Indignation would be hypocritical here. All soldiers in 1914 saw plundered French farms in areas where only French soldiers had passed through. This form of looting is an act of soldiers, not only Germans. Tables and chairs have been carried into the courtyard in front of the house. On top, empty glasses and bottles, a few sheets of paper and some pencils. German officers or Feldwebel stayed here, made themselves comfortable here …

  There are rabbits dead in their cages. The hens and cows have not run away. But they do not move, the hens aren’t pecking around and the cows aren’t grazing. Both are strangely immobile … Not lying down, standing; in fact more than immobile, frozen, frozen solid, stuck to the ground as if to a pedestal; chickens and cows after the end of the world.

  We eat our meals in the courtyard, seated on the running board of the car. Sometimes an old car becomes a sort of home. Our meals: a sardine and a little found bread. We are a flying column, gypsies. But starting the following day, Soutreux brings us or sends her maid with a pot of soup and a bottle of wine. Her kindness is a little sour, a little reluctant. We respond with a hypocritical politeness. We fear above all being thrown out, finding ourselves on the road without shelter, a road that leads nowhere. We accept without qualms, and our hypocrisy seems justified to us. The woman who offers champagne to German soldiers can very well, after all, offer us a little soup without our feeling an excess of gratitude …
We accept the way prisoners accept their rations. For in Soutreux’s house, we are evidently not in France. We are not exactly in Germany either. We’re in a country we didn’t know existed: a France that has come to terms with the German victory, or rejoices in it, a France that feels no connection to French customs or French character. We looked at this woman with bewilderment. We didn’t understand. And we asked ourselves whether she belonged to the “fifth column.”

  Doubtless she calculates the price of the food, as she calculates the price of her beveled-glass windowpanes, her gardener’s hours and her mattress (it’s a 1,200-franc mattress). We are providing our food and part of hers. Neither she nor we will eat her chickens or their eggs. From abandoned farms we bring back everything edible that the Germans left behind. I caught two stray rabbits; one I pinned against a fence, the other I cleverly forced into the corner of a cellar; two nourishing rabbits, two rabbits that are a diplomatic gift.

  That is when, for the first time, I heard the word salvage used in a new sense that seemed strange to me. For me the word had only an industrial and chemical resonance. I knew, for instance, that byproducts are salvaged. But everyone who brought back things found on the road (whether it was a motorcycle or a handkerchief) or looted from abandoned cars said candidly, “Here’s what I salvaged …”

  The vieux monsieur salvaged like a magpie. To him everything was good. It was his only occupation and his only concern. He was a true believer. He prowled from Les Douciers to the farms and from the farms to Les Douciers. Nothing escaped his investigations, not a calendar hanging on a wall or a tin of rice powder that had rolled into the roadside ditch. He exhibited his finds like a collector who discovered a magnificent bargain, a rare piece. He’s insistently generous. You’d think he worked only for the community. But he hides the big prizes and never offers anything but useless leftovers: for instance, the bottom of a zinc box with a sprinkling of ground coffee and powdered sugar in it. He offers them with a kind of bossy aggressiveness and seems furious if they are disdained.

  His son is a more ambitious salvager. He is nowhere to be seen during the day. He drives the roads at the wheel of a luxury car (this car uses more than twenty liters per hundred kilometers) and claims to be engaging in auto repairs. Indeed he is playing the role of the resourceful mechanic with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. But he returns the first evening with four spare tires, and as he opens his trunk I see three car batteries, clean as polished shoes and without a speck of corrosion on the terminals.

  He returns from the roads, roads of misery where women on foot drag exhausted children, and says to me, “It’s a gold mine right now, the roads.”

  If salvaging involves the abolition of a sense of ownership, it also involves its immediate reconstitution. This sense is, if I may say so, salvaged very quickly. The previous day, the Soutreux woman got hold of an abandoned bicycle. The following day she notices that its basket has disappeared. She’s outraged and shouts, “My basket has been stolen …”

  A van transporting office or factory workers has been parked in a field quite far from the road. The driver took this futile precaution hoping his van would be sheltered from looters. Soutreux suggests we “go look” at this van. With complete innocence, she orders her maid to bring a wheelbarrow. We’re not the first explorers. There’s a pitiful flea market on the grass, which is covered with file folders and administrative papers. And three typewriters catch the rays of the setting sun. In the field these office machines, the black metal and white keys, have a pathetic luster. A sort of exaltation seizes Madame Soutreux. “These machines,” she says, “are easily worth two or three thousand francs.” She bends down, and the maid goes over to the wheelbarrow.

  But all of a sudden a peasant woman herding her cows appears at the edge of the field and screams at us, and there’s no talking back: “Get the hell away from here … bunch of thieves. Quick … This is my place.”

  Soutreux leads the way with her maid pushing the wheelbarrow. We follow. It’s like a funeral procession.

  Here the reader shouldn’t give in to an overly righteous indignation; he shouldn’t judge from the heights of pure morality. I’d like to give a true image of this woman and not distort any trait. Don’t judge her the way one would on the Boulevard de la Madeleine in peacetime. When doctors identified kleptomania, they demanded indulgence for the neurotic women who stole in department stores. These women, they said, had been led to steal by the mass of dresses and finery, deprived of their willpower, hypnotized in these palaces of a thousand and one baubles. Here everything is strewn on the road, in the paths, in the fields. Everything seems like abandoned property, on offer: what the Germans left, what the first scavenging refugees left, all of it, from the can of preserves to the typewriter, from the evening dress to the motorcycle. Refugees find and take whatever there is, just as castaways on a desert island have no scruples about grabbing flotsam.

  But this excuse doesn’t seem valid to me for Soutreux. The reader will judge. In Les Douciers the Germans left some fifty bicycles that they had stolen or looted (whichever you’d prefer) in the Seine-et-Marne and Seine-et-Oise. Soutreux mobilizes us, Aufresne and I. She asks us to haul up and store these bicycles in her hayloft. “I will give them to people from the area when they return …” This patriotic philanthropy can only be a lie. There are scarcely five or six isolated farms within a radius of one kilometer. Soutreux could have given a more convincing pretext but she didn’t think of it: all the bicycles carry a plate with a name and an address. She could have said, “I’ll notify these people … that way they’ll recover their bicycles after the war.”

  I admit that we, Aufresne and I, were accomplices in this mass salvaging, this stockpiling. I complied out of weakness, out of obedience to the feudal lord, owner of the land where we were taking shelter, out of false politeness. Anyway, at that moment I didn’t realize the obsession with accumulation and the cupidity of our hostess. This filching of bicycles is of little interest, it might be said. We’ll see later on that I could not have passed over it in silence.

  We left Paris two weeks ago. We’re living in a prison, walled in by uncertainties. We have no gasoline; we don’t know the general situation or the possibilities of getting around. We’re receiving no news.

  My son left Paris a few hours before us. He is fifteen and left in a car with two friends, the younger of whom is fourteen and the older not yet eighteen. For more than a month we’ll know nothing about them (and thousands are experiencing the same anxiety). Is their car broken down? Have they been machine-gunned? In fact, they were allowed to take the Fontainebleau road and arrived that same evening without problems. But we did not know that.

  I open the trunk of the car. I pull out an old blazer of my son’s. That’s enough to stir up and intensify the constant anxiety that has taken his place. A garment retains the shape of a person, a shape without foundations or reference points, a shape that is, in a way, immaterial. This presence, this copy, is sometimes unbearable. Because this shape without flesh, which both compels our senses and evades them, which death itself does not destroy, isn’t a proof of life.

  Bread can now be found in the village of Dampierre, three kilometers from Les Douciers. Soutreux and Lerouchon bring back word from German soldiers. “It’s over with France, but not with England … A soldier said that.” For these women each of these soldiers is a bearer of truth that needs no verification. “A soldier said that.”

  “The armistice was signed this morning, at five …” Soutreux reports.

  Lerouchon adds, “The armistice is signed but there’s still fighting in the Vosges.” They say this as if announcing the start of the hunt. The moment they no longer hear cannons, they no longer feel their destiny connected to events.

  I ask, “Who told you that?…”

  They respond, “A woman on the road.” Lerouchon doesn’t resent my question. But Soutreux cannot excuse me for it.

  “Yes … a woman on the road. I’m repeating what sh
e told me …” She has some fairly complicated mechanism for loosely comprehending that this unknown woman is not exactly the face of historical truth. But to Soutreux, this truth is verbatim, and my doubt visibly exasperates her.

  “The news,” the old gardener tells me, “that comes out of the mouth, nobody knows where it comes from.” But his wisdom quickly turns into incoherence. At Dampierre a few French refugees’ cars were seen driving toward Paris; they flew a white flag. He tells me, “That is a sign that Frenchmen and Germans are equals.” I can’t get any further explanation from him, and he talks to me at length about a “Frenchman from Gien who was a Boche officer.”

  Soutreux’s maid announces peace for the twenty-first of the month. “It was on a parchment that her mother-in-law saw …”

  A rumor goes around that traffic is unrestricted in the occupied zone but can’t pass from the free zone into the occupied zone. So it seems our freedom of movement will extend beyond the occupied zone. An awful way to think, perhaps. But that’s what we’ve come to!

  We are waiting. Our thoughts swing from the event to our personal fate, from the heights back to ourselves. A historical panorama is unfolding before me without my being able to do anything about it. The French in 1914 waited, those in 1920 waited. And this collapse: I can only imagine how within a few weeks homegrown moralists will attribute the defeat to abandoning the soil, a taste for ease, disdain for work. It seems to me that France stopped thinking, in the most basic sense of the word. Hypnotized by Hitler or by Stalin, France stopped thinking for itself. When a people don’t think twice or no longer think, a Hitler or a Stalin thinks for them. Will the tandem of Hitler and Stalin take over Europe and France with the consent of this sort of Frenchmen, dedicated to a patriotism from newspapers and giving France no face but that of their own complacency?