33 Days

by Leon Werth

  I have told it accurately, but this story about the calf only proves that Abel is not easily intimidated and that German soldiers don’t systematically kill all civilians. The detail of a revolver shown but not aimed is individual. Another noncom might have put it more brutally. And what would have happened had Abel not been mistaken, if the calf had been one of his? It all varies according to the commander. The first soldiers who came through demanded wine at gunpoint. Their commanding officer, Abel told me, was “a real brute.”

  I haven’t talked about Choum, the Siamese cat. I love animals, but I dislike a certain way of loving animals. I have a horror of people who bestow all the resources of their tenderness on a dog or cat. And I like it even less when literature joins in (like moths on a garment, as they say).

  Nevertheless, I’ll mention that we were reunited with Choum. He tolerated the first days of the exodus well. The night we fled Chapelon, we had left him in the car. The door was open; he escaped. That was seventeen days ago. We find him on top of a pile of firewood. He meowed but did not approach. For seventeen days he’d had to live on scraps of meat thrown out by the Germans.

  Finally, he lets himself be picked up. We bring him into our bedroom. He isn’t afraid. But I can’t say he seems deeply satisfied. He sits on my knees, jumps on the bed, looks for a nice spot, gives up, jumps on my lap again. This is still only the return from wildness to domesticity.

  But that night he absolutely refused to sleep on a chair. He settles on the bed, up against me. (Never had I allowed nor sought such promiscuity.) That’s when he sings the hymn of a cat reunited with man. It wasn’t purring, much less meowing, it was a kind of whimper of joy, strange, high-pitched, that I had never heard from a cat, that continued till dawn and that he never did again.

  As the sun sets, we’re sitting on the bench against the front of the farmhouse. Some soldiers are wandering in the courtyard. An officer comes toward us and from a distance asks whose farm this is, who’s the one in charge here. There are many ways to answer such a question. Abel leapt up. I had the impression he was charging the officer; he stopped right in front of him.

  “I am …”

  He says these words with his head and body projected forward and his hand against his chest, fingers spread like a claw.

  He could not have expressed himself more clearly had he said, “I’m the master here; I tolerate you but I’m not afraid of you.”

  I thought of a tall devil with a face like Don Quixote who at the beginning of the 1914 war was at a crossroads in Woëvre at night sitting on his horse in a mess of jumbled-up regiments screaming, “Who’s in command here?”

  I wouldn’t have the foolishness to say the German officer was afraid. But either he was troubled by such defiance or he gave up mystified; he walked away without a word.

  I thought of you, Monsieur von Mützenbecher. Would a German peasant have made a stand like that?

  Abel had told me about a conversation he’d had with a German noncommissioned officer, a twenty-year-old student, a day or two before our return to Chapelon. “All nations,” Abel told him, “are responsible for the war. But Hitler is war itself.” The young man started only when Abel said Hitler’s name. And Abel, who distrusts smooth-talkers but appreciates eloquence, said to him, “You can’t do anything to me. I prefer to die standing than live on my knees …”

  But to me Abel says more simply, “They’re here. We must endure them but not demean ourselves.”

  He tells me of a demeaning gesture. In Lorris, about thirty women were lining up in front of a bakery. They weren’t used to that yet. They were jostling one another and soon were insulting each other. One of the women called out to a German soldier and asked him to “bring some order to all this.” This German didn’t love order as much as some others, or maybe he hadn’t been given that assignment. He laughed.

  Young anarchists before 1914 used to say quite readily, “What does it matter to us if the Germans invade Paris?… The trains will run better.” But they weren’t thinking that the inventiveness of a people, say, the Germans, might attack problems other than the railways while on foreign soil. But there isn’t the same baseness in that as in accepting order at any price, such as their setting up “engineers of the soul.”† In those distant times, among those Frenchmen who didn’t align with the cardinal points of the political map, some had modesty in their nationalism, thought it indecent for a son to shout from the rooftops that he loves his mother. Others loved France as some of the insane love. Their love is a delirium of rage and jealousy, fed by base motives. They accuse their wives of vile or incestuous affairs.

  While lost in these mediocre reflections I followed the sinuous curves of an old sideboard. My pipe and that old sideboard became my opium. But I don’t want to lose hold of myself or my hold on what I call civilization. I’m not a man on a desert island; in any case there are no more desert islands. Montaigne, Pascal, humanism. But watch out for pedants who trade in it, watch out for the petty shopkeepers of humanism.

  If we are to believe the incoherent Radio France, France will have three governments: the Kommandantur in Paris, a government in Clermont-Ferrand and another in London. Plus that woman in Lorris and all those like her. This is the bottom. We’ve hit bottom. It’s time to reinvent patriotism, to redefine nationalism. An opportune moment: people certainly no longer have any.

  The field kitchen is set up under the shed next to Madame Rose’s house. Two detachments have come for food, the first in gray-green and boots, the second in shorts … Floating comically above this undulation of bare shoulders are a few heads shaped like necks, such as the painter Grosz drew after the 1914 war, and the pointed head of a little Herr Doktor with eyeglasses.

  An order. The detachment of men in shorts marches away in groups of four. But the man in front kicks his legs forward, goose-stepping, as a joke. I do my best to shake off a stupid idea: This soldier, however he can, is relieving oppression. He’s mocking an entire regime. His leg kicked forward makes a dent in the regime. He’s kicking Hitler.

  One of the men from the field kitchen has grabbed a dress and apron that Madame Rose had washed and that were drying on the line. He’s using them to scrub and polish the wheels. Madame Rose notices, snatches them from his hands and heaps insults on him: “You’re ’bout to see out if I’s washed this dress to clean your dirty grease.” (In Chapelon they speak like this, and after my stay in Les Douciers, I like this way of speaking and it touches me, much more so than had I been born in the Gâtinais.) The field-kitchen men yell, “Kaput!” But they give in.

  They polish the spokes vigorously with a brush. An hour later an officer inspects the field kitchen. It’s like this in every army in the world, but with nuances. A French officer would no doubt have found that the spokes of the wheel were guilty of not shining like the rays of the sun. But the German officer makes a speech that could be heard from a distance. I call it a speech, for I can’t manage to figure out whether he’s scolding, reprimanding and threatening, or he’s giving them a course in the technique of cleaning field-kitchen wheels. The tone is at once authoritarian and litanic. You’d think a prophet had come or that a preacher is preaching about the wheels of field kitchens.

  A soldier is washing at the well. An athlete lifting weights is tattooed on his arm. Not a swastika or a portrait of Hitler. It’s an athlete with bulging biceps. So the art of tattooing develops independently of regimes, faithful to itself.

  I accompany Abel Delaveau into town. Ladon has about a thousand inhabitants. For days I’ve seen only a farmyard and, between the farm and Madame Rose’s house, a haystack and a pile of beet pulp. Ladon seems like a big city to me.

  Abel’s brother-in-law, a retired schoolteacher, lives in Ladon. He had fled by bicycle with his wife. When he returned, his door had been broken down and was ruined, but he recovered his furniture.

  It is indeed true that the Germans shot thirteen French soldiers and eight civilians. In Ladon, as in other French towns, there were
attempts at resistance. A few civilians (refugees) had joined forces with soldiers. The Germans found them in a cellar, where two people from the town, an old man and his wife, were also hiding. The old couple, knowing the area well, was able to escape through the countryside. The Germans took the others and put them up against the wall. Traces of blood can still be seen. Then they threw incendiary grenades into the whole group of houses. Only sections of wall, debris, pitted facades and rubble remain.

  The Germans dug two graves, one for the soldiers and one for the civilians … They planted two crosses. On one: Dreizehn Soldaten. On the other: Acht Franzosen. On each of the communal graves they threw some flowers.

  “Do you know,” a Monsieur D. tells us, “who is really responsible for France’s defeat? The schoolteachers.” I heard that this very morning. “Responsible because of what they taught and because, since they are practically all officers, they gave the signal that it was every man for himself.”

  I thought he was repeating the words of a madman or that this was the sign of some political delirium searching no matter where for personifications and symbols. But I’ve since heard the accusation again. And I recall the mystical pharmacist who declared with satisfaction that the war would at least have the excellent result that schoolteachers and members of parliament could no longer be paid.

  “I’ve never made patriotism my business,” Monsieur D. says with patriarchal solemnity, “but I fought in the other war, and I told my son, ‘Do your duty …’ ”

  His son is an officer trainee at Saumur and told him during a leave that all his schoolmates were fascists. That debate is outside my subject. I’m recounting and resisting commentary. But I notice that this war has exacerbated political hatreds and that partisans of order at any price, similar in this to revolutionaries hypnotized by the Russians, can’t conceive of that order except with a foreign face. And I believe that France is Abel Delaveau and the old schoolteacher.

  The charm of Ladon is a little river without embankments that runs between houses, framed by facades and foliage: an intimate river. It is a pleasant, quaint setting where the water seems ancient.

  Some German soldiers got hold of a rowboat, probably the only one the river had ever known. The boat is gliding along, and one of the soldiers, standing in the bow, is playing the accordion.

  They are only soldiers enjoying themselves. But they’re acting serious. I’d swear they think they’re charming us. They’re gondoliers of victory, showing the vanquished how to use the right setting and the poetry of an accordion in a rowboat. I couldn’t say why … but at that moment I recalled a strange restaurant in Berlin where I’d eaten a dozen years earlier. It was in an immense building. Each floor evoked a region, a province. Trompe l’oeil landscapes covered the walls. The waitresses were dressed ridiculously, some as Bavarians, some as Austrians. Everything was folkloric, comic opera and panorama.

  The racket fills the silence enclosed by these facades, these falling leaves and this little stream. The accordion can be heard throughout the town. A hundred meters away a sentry stands guard in front of the town hall. A hundred meters away are the communal graves.

  About thirty French prisoners are crammed into a garage in Chapelon. I’d like to chat with them, to learn about their war from them. It’s difficult. They’ll only say that they have no complaints about the Germans. Anything to tell? For them it all can be summarized like this: they were holding, they weren’t discouraged, then suddenly it seemed as if they’d been freed from military discipline and turned loose on the roads, the way one frees a bird who doesn’t know how to fly outside its cage. They weren’t even given some routine explanation. Their silence contrasts with the talkative Germans. Stranger and more unexpected is that the Germans reveal more of themselves with isolated German words, which we can often make sense of only through their facial expressions.

  A soldier is hanging his shirt on a clothesline in the sun. He’s clumsy, he doesn’t even know how to use the clothespins that are on the line. Madame Rose shows him how to do it. That’s all. She doesn’t say a word. Does she want to win the goodwill of the conquerors? No … she can’t tolerate work badly done, she can’t help herself. But these little favors, the canned monkey and tobacco handed out, even the gesture of making the shed, which the farm uses as a little workshop, off-limits to the troops, who had already stolen some tools, all create contact, a familiarity. History is difficult. France is large. Chapelon is small. A courtyard in Chapelon is smaller still. In principle the Kommandantur, since the departure of the “real brute,” reprimands pilfering. Thus it’s understandable that poor people might lose the right balance between submission under pressure and their sense of dignity.

  This war isn’t evolving like others. Hate hasn’t been generated through the stereotypical images. It is quite remarkable that the word Boches is rarely heard anymore, and that the Germans have become “the Germans.” But no less surprising to me is that the women don’t say “the Germans” but rather “the soldiers,” as if there were a kind of equivalence among all armies.

  The Germans have left. We’re hoping no more will come. Obviously, with a few months’ hindsight, it was an absurd hope. But the word occupation did not have a well-defined meaning for us. The Germans are going back up to Paris and are going to return home. Chapelon is four kilometers from the main highway. Perhaps they’ll forget about us.

  They’re gone. It’s like peacetime. There’s silence at dusk, as in all villages in peacetime. I say to Abel Delaveau, “The village resembles its old self.”

  “Yes … but not completely. The squeak of a horse cart or a bicyclist returning home is missing …”

  The following day, new convoys go by on the road. The trucks follow each other at distances so absolutely equal that one thinks of a geometrical parade. The rumbling is continuous, a noise like gravel on a conveyor belt. Once again I feel as if everything that passes by on the road passes over me, that everything it bears, I bear.

  Some officers get out of their cars and exchange very tense salutes. They train their binoculars on the rear of the convoy and on the sky, at three high-flying aircraft.

  British aircraft, perhaps. Who said that?… I don’t recall. It’s our supreme hope and so seems like a wish for a miracle.

  Meanwhile, in Ladon there’s a rumor that Russia took Bessarabia, Poland and eastern Prussia. The Germans station a few cannons in a field under some trees. We conclude that they’re being hidden from aircraft; we think the officers look worried.

  The cannons remain in the field. An artillery unit installs itself in the village.

  The cannons are in the orchard and soldiers in shorts are everywhere. We’re under the domination of cannons and shorts. Oppression is cannons and shorts.

  It’s an artillery regiment of Saxons. They all insist on letting us know they’re Saxons, but never fail to add that Saxons or Prussians, they’re all Germans. In fact they’re not as arrogant or sarcastic as the soldiers who were billeted in Les Douciers before the signing of the armistice. Nor are they completely like the soldiers who occupied Chapelon before that. But is it a difference of province or branch of the army? The others were infantrymen, these are artillerymen. Indeed, they seem less absolutely military. They don’t arrive at the field kitchens for food in tight ranks. They’re capable of bringing their mess tins without obeying an order and without forming up in groups of four.

  Although they’re Saxons, they are no less capable of astonishing military perfection when they assemble for roll call in the farm courtyard. They are perfectly straight, still and uniform when standing at attention. Their eyes-right and eyes-left are masterpieces of interchangeable mechanics. Even their enthusiasm is military. As much as left-face and eyes-left, the guttural orders and responses are prescribed by theory. At each command they all shout, “Heil!” (I believe!). One might think of the shouts of admiration or howls of laughter heard not long ago in mess halls or those “artistic” basement cabarets. But more forceful. More li
ke the brutal, imperative honk of a car horn. I don’t understand what the officer is saying to them. He’s chanting, raucously, but chanting.

  The field kitchen is no longer under the shed next to Madame Rose’s house. It is directly in front of Abel Delaveau’s door. They put it there to be near the well, no doubt. It is impossible to enter the house without passing the cooks, their friends or groups of soldiers getting food. That doesn’t bother them.

  I go into the house from time to time to avoid seeing them, to forget them. Then I feel an instant relief, as if I were getting into a bath after a long walk. We ache from Germans.

  They’re clean. They wash at the well, torsos bare. They plunge their heads into the bucket. But it’s not exactly what we call cleanliness. It’s an exhibition of cleanliness. They could put you off water forever. Civilization isn’t solely a pump, a tap or even a shower. I’d already felt this in the Far East when I saw the Europeans, so proud of their hydrotherapy facilities.

  They’re cheerful, but what laughter! A laughter that comes from the perineum and that the throat amplifies like a loudspeaker. Will we ever dare laugh again?

  They want to be courteous. But if they want to speak to you and you turn your back on them, they never hesitate to touch your shoulder.

  The cook announces that Spain has taken Gibraltar. This is surely from Völkischer Beobachter.‡ All news they find agreeable they assume is agreeable to everyone.

  Day and night a sentry, weapon slung over his shoulder, goes round the village. At night he passes right near our window. The noise of his boots drowns out the sound of the horses bumping against their stalls and the magic flute of the toads.