33 Days

by Leon Werth

  They march by fours wearing bathing suits, in step, singing. But their song is militarized, determined by the soldiers’ manual and orderly as a drumroll. They sing sometimes every fourth step, sometimes every eighth step. Sometimes the song gets louder and sometimes their footfalls mark time. This mixture of nudism on parade and singing brings to mind a Surrealist joke or those cartoons of a nude Negro in a top hat.

  They may be ridiculous. But as the peasants say, they’re the masters. On a wall in front of the town hall the Kommandantur has put up an official notice in German and French. The French translation is dubious but not obscure: “To the occupied populations … Occupation troops must treat the populace with care, provided it remains peaceful.” No one had promised to treat me with care yet. “It is prohibited to listen to non-German radio stations in public or in groups, with the exception of a foreign radio station authorized by headquarters.”

  A rumor circulates that an order has been given to bring all radios to the town hall. The rumor was never confirmed.

  “On the wireless,” Madame Rose reports, “they said that male refugees must get back on foot, that women and children would be brought home.”

  They’re saying … Now we depend on what “they’re saying.”

  “Based on whether one is headstrong or not,” Madame Rose says, “one could very well go to prison …”

  He’s colossal, a colossus perforated by two blue eyes. Who knows why his eyes are in the middle of his face. They could be anywhere else on his body without it being a surprise. The contours of his face are in fact hardly more delicate than the contours of a thigh or forearm. This colossus is sitting on the bench next to me. And he’s telling me his life story. He is thirty-one. He enlisted for twelve years and has already done eight. His three brothers are soldiers as well. He’s a corporal, a longtime corporal. He is proud of his rank and his seniority in that rank. The day he was promoted to corporal was a big day … He went through Romorantin and Orléans; he did his duty, he served his country (Plficht … Vaterland§) and was lucky enough not to be wounded and to have kept his good health.

  He also talks to me about the occupation of the Rhineland by the French and England, which is responsible for the war. But very little, less than the others. International politics is not his forte. He mentions it only out of consideration, in case I’m not in possession of the truth he gets from briefings, the way he gets his rations from the field kitchen. He’s sharing with me.

  The next day I pretend not to recognize the colossal corporal. But in vain. He comes straight for me and brings me three packs of cigarettes … Two days later, I flee again. But he has other confidences in store for me. Pointing to his officer, he tells me the man is only twenty-one and has no experience. He tells me a rather long story, which I understand very poorly. I think it’s about a scrape, when the experienced corporal had to make up for the shortcomings of the young officer, whose knowledge comes only from schools.

  Everything I will try in order to escape the colossal corporal will be in vain. He brings me packets of tobacco, packs of cigarettes. It’s only looted tobacco. But then he brings me a box of cigarettes that had been sent him by his “mamma.” And ten times he repeats tenderly, “Mamma … Mamma!…”

  I have no doubts: the colossal corporal needs a confidant. He’s not finding any in his army. And it’s me he has chosen, for reasons only God knows. He’s looking for human intimacy. He is thick-skinned. No matter; I understand that in his fashion he’s looking for what Montaigne calls, “the exercise of souls, with no other fruit.”

  I have to tell everything about the colossal corporal, we’ll see why later on. We’ll see what contrasts a man can show, even a reenlisted corporal, even a German. The colossal corporal approached the bench where we were sitting. One of Abel Delaveau’s neighbors, wounded in the last war, was showing me his atrophied arm and unusable hand, which he almost always kept gloved. But he had removed the glove. The hand was white and thin, with pink fingernails, pathetically like that of a woman of leisure, while the other was a peasant’s hand, large and calloused. The farmer rolled up his sleeve: the arm was skeletal. Then the corporal, offering a comparison, smiling wide, also rolled up his sleeves, and crossing his arms made his athletic biceps bulge.

  I thought: That’s Germany. And for a long time I could not resist this too-simplistic idea.

  We’re being “kept.” Soldiers are handing out cans of monkey, sardines and “zalmon,” chocolates and candy. But they are all French brands. Everything comes from Rouen or Orléans; everything had been looted. When we were sitting on the grass with the Aufresnes a few kilometers from Les Douciers, a German soldier handed us a can of monkey. That was the first time. And we were hungry and had nothing else to eat. Had I been alone I might have refused this gift from the conqueror.

  I say might have. In these things one shouldn’t commit lightly. One shouldn’t judge categorically or translate honor into a written code. It’s all circumstance; everything depends on nothing, on a look. That day, I didn’t have to decide for myself. I wasn’t the one taking the canned monkey from the soldier’s hand. But I ate some like everyone else.

  This becomes a game. Everyone shows off the soldiers’ gifts the way they would show off booty. Rustics don’t have a casuistry for points of honor. After all, it’s not submission, it’s more repossession. Anyway, we’re prisoners of a sort, and prisoners don’t uphold honor by letting themselves die of hunger.

  The field kitchen, as I’ve said, is in front of the farmhouse kitchen. The bench is a good observation post. The colossal corporal is emptying a bottle of wine in a single draft, without taking his lips from the mouth of the bottle. He’s filling himself with wine the way he would fill a fuel tank. A soldier has a chocolate bar in one hand and a slab of butter in the other. Alternately, he bites into the chocolate and the butter.

  The soldiers have stolen some eggs and some potatoes. The potato stealers must not be rurals. They’ve pulled up the foliage without digging deeper and have unearthed only some tubers the size of three pinheads.

  They threw an artillery cartridge in Abel Delaveau’s pond. The fish are floating belly-up. Sometimes you complain, sometimes not. The Kommandantur is all-powerful. Nobody knows whether it’s better to endure or to protest.

  Some beehives had been set up next to an old windmill. Its sails had long ago been detached and the old wooden beams piled next to the beehives. Some soldiers had set fire to the hives and the beams. Presumably these honey thieves were just clumsy, but why had they set fire to the windmill blades?

  I went over to the windmill. The sails were still burning. A swarm was buzzing around, stranded in front of a half-charred hive.

  If I’m far from the farm for long I feel doubly exiled. I can’t manage to put together this sky and those clumps of trees. The crops are so closely spaced that the countryside looks like a department store with innumerable counters of wheat and oats.

  A German soldier asks to buy some milk. He’s in bathing trunks. But he is polite. He salutes with a quick nod and a bow. His costume and the bow are incongruous, it seems to me. But do the Germans have a sense of the ridiculous? And he had doubtless forgotten that he was in a bathing suit.

  These Saxon artillerymen are not the same Germanic type as the infantrymen who occupied the village before them. We’re no longer seeing death’s heads topped with flax. Most of these are brown-haired, very southern types. But brown-haired or blond, their ideas come from the same factory. Their field kitchen of news is a perfect machine. No doubt their newspapers are identical, but they digest them identically. Hitler loves peace and only England wanted war.

  They are intrusive. But does the word have any meaning for them? They all ask what my profession is. I didn’t understand the word Beruf. By analogies and gestures they revealed its meaning to me. It was so difficult that I momentarily forgot about the war and responded like an interrogated schoolboy. I was no longer in an occupied country but in fourth grade, reviewin
g columns of words in an old glossary.

  A soldier washing his clothes in a bucket raises his head and says to us, “England is at war with France.” This news seems grossly absurd to us. It goes without saying that we can imagine nothing of the real facts that it distorts and translates into propaganda.

  He offers us a copy of Völkischer Beobachter. An entire page is filled with death announcements, each framed by a black line … Each concerns a soldier dead at the front, not only for Germany but “Für Führer und Vaterland.”

  The cooks are peeling vegetables. On a chair they have set up a phonograph, which is spewing waltzes. The soldiers shout and bawl, raking up big shovelfuls of verbal rubble. The courtyard’s peace is violated. We’re no longer even masters of our own silence.

  The noncommissioned officers eat their meals inside the farmhouse living room, kitchen and dining room. Abel Delaveau is no longer master, after God, of his own table. But for the moment there is no force that could chase them from that house. They pay no attention to us, and we pretend to ignore them.

  But it’s not the same with the cooks. They use the oven for the “gourmet meals.” With words and gestures Madame Delaveau demanded they use their own coal and not any of hers. They gave in. They offered a little coffee, a little salt.

  One evening we were all sitting on the bench in front of the house. They brought their phonograph. It’s not a concert just for them. It’s a concert for us. They’re offering us a waltz by Johann Strauss, a crass female music-hall singer and a comic of the Ouvrard genre.ǁ We form two groups with no hostility but with no connection.

  One of the cooks has brought a German grammar. He is sitting next to Madame Rose’s sixteen-year-old daughter. They’re looking at a vocabulary exercise together. It was straightforward, with nothing questionable. The young girl doesn’t pose a problem. She’s not a peasant girl; she works at a monotonous job as a seamstress, dreaming, no doubt, of Paris and its big department stores. These Saxon and Rhenish soldiers are nothing to her but young people on vacation.

  It’s a spectacle that would have been intolerable for revanchists, Fourteenth of July parade-goers and music-hall patriots. But those types have disappeared, and they aren’t missed. Even so, I ask myself whether in all wars there aren’t these contacts between conquered populations and victorious soldiers. Historians and novelists neglect them, because they want their texts to be edifying and discreet, because such unfortunate details break with the party line, spoil their crude imagery.

  Though Abel says to me, “Individually, they are men, like us,” he feels the way I do, that any submission beyond what the enemy may force by coercion is always questionable. Madame Rose thinks more simply that past eight in the evening girls should not banter with soldiers, and she orders her daughter to bed.

  We are eating, and eating well. We have rediscovered the ritual of mealtimes, momentarily forgotten. We are sleeping in a good bed. But we know nothing about our son and his two friends. Though I’m repeating to my wife that “nothing can have happened to them,” I end up imagining the worst. I see them lying in a ditch, dying of hunger or wounded. I see my errant son searching for a morsel of bread. Did they return to Paris? Are they in Tournus, Trévoux, Saint-Amour, three possible destinations where they’d be safe? No way to communicate with them. And we are stuck, as they may be. Even if we had gasoline, where would we look for them? It’s always the same empty deliberation in a vacuum.

  We’re leading a strange life that is attached to nothing apart from the kindness and sensitivity of the Delaveaus. We’re prisoners, isolated from everything. We’re receiving only information about the repairing of power lines and the reestablishment of train and mail service. The most tragic, most contradictory rumors circulate about political and military events. Convincing or crazy, they are distorted from mouth to mouth. Seemingly born by spontaneous generation, they transform politics into clichés, they’re nothing but the fabrications of fear, they stave off a hunger for certainty that nothing can feed. Machine-gun fire is less depressing.

  It is said that at the Gien and Sully bridges the Germans threw cars, bicycles and baby carriages into the water to clear the roadway faster. The story has a surprising precision: at the Gien bridge, the German guarding the left-hand sidewalk removed the babies before throwing their carriages into the Loire, but the German guarding the right threw everything, babies and carriages, into the water.

  Today, July 4th, a soldier shows us a German newspaper from June 29th: Paul Reynaud’s car overturned on the Saint-Tropez road. Marshal Balbo died in aerial combat. He was “a great friend of Germany.”

  The smallest gift of what we call civilization is that the details of events, if not their meaning, don’t escape us. But this hamlet in the Gâtinais is as far from events as the Sahara. And never were the fates of individuals as closely tied to what we call history as during this war. Our life consists of waiting, anxiety and the passage of time.

  The colossal corporal would very much like to chat with me, to tell me again in pidgin German the big events of his life, to show me the photograph of his wife again. Yesterday he told me what he counts on doing when he’s out of the service. But I couldn’t understand whether the profession he was describing with the gesture of two arms in the air and the words “Schwarzer Mann” was that of a miner, a coal maker or a chimney sweep. I flee. And yet I see that he’s hiding two packages of tobacco in his hand. I’ve never shown such dignity. He is disconcerted. He salutes me formally. As he would a commanding officer. Everything is correct, a regulation salute, except the slightly disappointed smile he adds.

  The best moment of the day is when Abel Delaveau brings back a cartful of forage. I help store it in the barn. Then we sit on the bench, or in the living room if it’s empty of Germans, and we chat.

  But mostly I ponder time, the passing of time. Counterrevolutionaries played the clavichord in Coblentz; revolutionaries before 1914 drank tea in London or Zurich, reconstructing the world in their imaginations. History allowed them their little corners, not us.

  I’ve already said how I rewrote history. Now I set up a veritable workshop for historical repairs. History obeyed my commands. Victory breaks Germany as defeat would have.

  I even invented an electromagnetic device. A recurring daydream. “Isn’t my idea excellent, Saint-Exupéry?” In each airplane I placed a tube whose rays explode all motors not equipped with an equalizer tube.

  I feel all the stupidity of the war weighing on me. Like between 1916 and 1918. But the other stupid war was fed by passions. Since the defeat, it seems to me the French masses contemplate events the way peasants watch hail falling. I’ve seen the face of defeat on soldiers fleeing along the roads; I have not seen it on civilians. And I had lived through only the defeat, not yet those days to come when it seemed as if a people were surrendering itself. But weren’t you an internationalist? (An idiot … as Abel Delaveau and thousands of peasants would put it.) Yes, but not since the concept lost its meaning. One can’t unite nothing with nothing. And the resignation itself was repugnant. If I had seen some other nation suddenly consent to French domination because France had been victorious, I’d have despised that nation.

  There’s bliss among the German soldiers, an expansion of self. A single idea in each head, but an idea without roots, an interchangeable idea revealed each day. Each day they’re ready for a new revelation.

  Walled in; we’re walled in. In the village, there’s someone who really is walled in. I could go share his prison. He is the longtime priest of Chapelon who, after thirty years’ ministry, was banned. The woman who was the cause of his ban lives with him. She can be seen around the village, but he never crosses the threshold of his walled garden. Such is Abel Delaveau’s natural nobility that in his account of this priest’s story there is not a single coarse detail to be found, no food for scandal. And yet God knows how little Abel loves religion.

  I’m becoming apathetic. Chapelon is a kind of ivory tower, or simply a burrow. My
boundaries are the cannons under the orchard trees, the field kitchen in the courtyard, the haystacks and the roofs. But I can no longer look at the lines of trucks passing along the road. I close my eyes. I try not to hear. I’d like to stay like that, waiting for history to let me live.

  At the door of the town hall–schoolhouse, a German officer politely makes way for my wife. He hesitates, then suddenly says in passable French, “You are afraid of us, madame?”

  “Afraid? No, monsieur. But as long as you wear that suit (she points at his uniform) here, you are my enemy.”

  “But our Führer did not want war. It is France that declared war.”

  “I’ve read Mein Kampf …”

  The officer seems embarrassed and responds, “We’re changing … one can change, and the fault is England’s, which, I swear in the name of Jesus, wants to dominate the world.”

  Such dialogue makes sense only through its tone and intent. The “you are afraid of us?,” the “are we so terrible after all?” were clichés uttered by hundreds of Germans at the beginning of the occupation. This one blamed only the English. But most often total responsibility for the war was attributed to the English and the Jews, or even the Jews alone. Delirious interpretations, illusions personified, fabricated scapegoats. And Gutenberg’s invention isn’t free of blame: At the behest of the worst interests, it spreads the emptiest abstractions, devoid of bone and flesh. The Jews, instigators of carnage? Why not blame raccoons or the platypus?

  “The 1875 constitution is abolished. Flandin is dictator.” The farmhouse living room is lit by an oil lamp. (We have no electricity, the lines were cut.) Its light throws deep shadows on faces. A light from days gone by. Abel and I are sitting opposite each other. This news drops between us like a fly on the table.

  We agree immediately that there is perhaps a dictatorship, but not this dictator. A dictator needs a little legend and a lot of popularity, enough at least so crowds join the police in cheering when he passes by.