33 Days

by Leon Werth

  The ones who most praise the wisdom of peasants are the same ones who deplore the passions of politics. They suggest that peasants are spared such passions, that they draw their wisdom straight from the soil. I’ve rarely seen a peasant who wasn’t a “political animal.” True, men of the soil have a politics of butter, just as workers have a politics of wages and bourgeois have, or had, a politics of annuities. But how crude that is. It’s not true that ideas and feelings are never more than a transmutation, a sublimation of interests. At any rate, whenever I’ve chatted with peasants, I’ve always admired their political sense. They’re not fooled by reversible ideas with which workers are sometimes exalted and other times bullied. And they resist those vast syntheses that semi-cultured bourgeoisie juggle.

  Chapelon is in fact divided into two clans: the whites and the reds. The Montargis newspapers were teasing out of each commune the reasons for the polemic. A boy from Chapelon, playing with the carbine from a shooting gallery, wounded a little girl. The parents of one being from the “left” and the other from the “right,” a Montargis newspaper made the accident into political vengeance.

  An old man in the village, whose patriarchal courtesy I love—one of those old people who are likened to a gnarled tree stump (hackneyed but accurate)—tells me that a big jeweler from Paris had taken refuge in Chapelon. This retailer, who was traveling with gold ingots in his car, was rejoicing that the Paris police and the gardes mobiles were intact. This way Belleville and Billancourt would surely be kept in line. (I’d heard nearly the same words from Aufresne’s mouth at Les Douciers.)

  The old peasant invited him to keep quiet and told him such language wasn’t appreciated in Chapelon.

  This happened in the Gâtinais. But I know regions where the workers are regarded as “profiteers,” where their unrest is feared and there isn’t the generosity to forgive them for having allowed fewer casualties during the 1914 war than the rural inhabitants.

  I’m told that the B.’s are the area’s rich people. They have numerous farms that they rent out, and in Chapelon they raise only two cows and some chickens. They are noted, without an excess of goodwill, to be in perpetual conversation with a German noncommissioned officer who wears an aviator’s uniform. This is a very strange character who lurks almost everywhere and seems to attend roll call as if he were a guest. I believe, like everyone else, that he serves as a stool pigeon. Though I never had proof, B. is accused of … exchanging undignified words with the German and shamelessly comparing a France wholly devoted to fun with an orderly, hardworking Germany. A rumor is going round that he invited the aviator to dinner.

  I think of the stories we were told about the 1870 war, about the silent and disdainful pride the enemy ran up against. True or not, these stories have the same significance. In either case they testify to how we wanted to appear.

  When I was a small child, I heard the story of my aunt Léonie’s handshake told a hundred times, a story that, as in all families, was polished and definitive, perfect as a work of art.

  During the 1870 war one of my uncles, an engineering officer, had been taken prisoner in Sélestat. After the armistice, my aunt was allowed to go see her husband. Here I have only my childhood memories. They consist of a historical tableau: my uncle is shut up in a fortress, a bunker or perhaps a dungeon. A German officer leads my aunt to him down gloomy corridors, opens a door, salutes nobly and leaves.

  The essence is that, for a few hours or a few days, the officer relaxed the regulations. He was so humane that it posed a problem for my aunt that for another woman would have been only elementary civility and decency. But she had an austere morality, left nothing to chance, and all her feelings, including her patriotism, were uncompromising. For her this was not a problem, it was a matter of conscience. Before returning to France, should she respond to the officer’s salute by an inclination of the head? Or, to show her gratitude and not be outdone in nobility, should she offer him a handshake? My aunt thought the laws of war authorized extending her hand. She held out her hand. Oh, her body rigid and an indication, a hint, of a handshake! But after such deep deliberation! And it was one of the family’s legends. Also, I believe that thirty years later my aunt still had qualms.

  I was only beginning to perceive among some Frenchmen (Soutreux and Lerouchon were simply monsters) a disappearance of all national decency or a genuflecting to some supposed face of order, of absolute order, of order that discounts any human resistance. Or maybe they believe, as was once true and may be true again, that the war was not so much a combat between peoples as a settling of political scores. But how can we believe that this war is anything but the old diplomatic game or even an economic battle? I seem to be watching a part of France unite with Germany and murder Pascal.

  It’s Sunday. The French prisoners who are housed with farmers meet the colossal corporal at the inn. Everyone has his own liter, and the colossal corporal toasts with a vengeance. This does not scandalize me at all. It’s something between combatants. It conforms with the rites of war as practiced before 1914. It even conforms with the infantry manual (it ought to be corrected), which says something like, outside combat, opposing armies should treat each other as comrades and give each other assistance.

  Abel Delaveau asked for a prisoner. A farmer from near Dijon who fought at the Somme arrives glum and silent. Men of the soil aren’t effusive. The first day he uttered a single phrase, “I know how to load a wagon.” It was in front of the stable in response to a question Abel was asking him. He ate his meals with Abel. In two days he was transformed. From a zoo animal he turned back into a young peasant. But he didn’t like to talk about the war, the defeat or his captivity. I saw many soldiers like that, avoiding the war the way some people don’t like to talk about their illnesses.

  Very different was a prisoner from the Vaucluse who was placed at a neighboring farm. He’d inspire terror, if his air of ferocity were to be believed. But it’s only an air, a southerner’s mimicry. He recounts clearly, in distinct tableaux, artfully, dramatically. Is he telling the truth? Modifying? Exaggerating? I have no idea.

  “We were betrayed … sold out …

  “There were seven of us left from the regiment; I’m saying the regiment, not the company …

  “My commander escaped twice, and twice he was recaptured …

  “The colonel blew his brains out. He said, ‘The Germans won’t get a word from me.’

  “But the captain, in civilian life a big coal merchant, opened his bag in front of me and pulled out civilian clothing; he put it on … I said to him, ‘Captain, only mountains never meet … we’ll run into each other again.’ He said, ‘You’ll be killed before that.’ He joined his son; they took off together …”

  German trucks are flying up the road at sixty-five kilometers per hour. In a field an old woman, her head wrapped in a kerchief, a fanchon, and an old man bent at the waist are digging for potatoes. I turn my back on the trucks. The village and the whole countryside are covered with Germans. At Madame Rose’s the women are crocheting: “Reduce to sixteen.” These magic words and the movement of the crochet hooks obsess me.

  “They said …” The mysterious “they,” the “they” of wars and revolutions; the “they” that means the powerful, the earth’s great; the “they” that now means only the Germans.

  They said some French ships had been sunk by the English. They said that there was a red army in France organized by Reynaud. With Abel Delaveau I try to make sense of the lies and absurdity, to detect in them a French wish or German intent. The news, the rumors allegorize vague political passions, they muddle the possible and the impossible, fabricate a monster out of distant associations (Reynaud raising a red armya).

  But when I talk with Abel, I feel full of hope. I’m unaccustomed to such large events. I need a sharp mind. He has one, and that keenness is a gift. A strange illusion: when I chat with Abel it seems as if all the stupidity of the war is eliminated. It’s as if I’d just won a victory.


  Madame Rose brings us some news. This is proven, verified. A typist from Ladon, an educated woman, not one of those women who repeat nonsense, “heard it on the wireless.”

  “If Germany has not withdrawn its troops by the fourteenth, America comes in swinging …”

  Today is July 10th. I too, after all, am losing myself in a dream of childish corrections of history.

  Madame Delaveau surprises a soldier in the barn stealing an egg. He hides it awkwardly in his pocket … She calls him a thief and threatens him with the Kommandantur. Words spin round each other like billiard balls. The peasant woman expresses herself in a single stream, without punctuation. The German, angry, replies with shouts and gestures. She’s speaking French; he’s speaking German. They can’t understand each other except by tone and gestures. The German gives in and returns the egg.

  I know I’m not recounting a big event. But there are no small events. A person and his nation are wholly within the smallest act. Knowledgeable psychologists have said this in different language. I’m surprised the soldier gave in, not immediately like a shamed thief but after having shouted and threatened. I saw in that the effect of a decision from above, of an order from headquarters. Hitler’s Germany, for the moment, does not want to rule solely by terror. A game is being played with the firing squad in Ladon, the prohibition on petty theft and their “Are we so terrible after all?” And the moderation the official notice advised for soldiers “if the population remains peaceful” is that much easier if they eat their fill, if they have all the stores they have requisitioned or looted since the defeat.

  Behind this soldier is the entire might of the Reich, and the eyes of German soldiers are “full of victory,” as a peasant said to me. I’m obsessed by the idea that between this soldier and myself there is no man-to-man relationship or any relation determined by the laws and customs of a common country. There’s only the law of war, which is nothing but utility and caprice. Between him and me, it is understood that he has the power of life or death.

  His belt buckle shines. On it I can read distinctly, “Gott mit uns.” The idea of God seemed obscure to me. There you have the dangers of popularization.

  I was boss of the farm. Abel being out gathering forage, his wife asked me to stay with her and her two daughters. Seated on the bench, I’m guarding the farmhouse door. I’m protecting the women and children and reigning over twenty hectares of hay, beets and wheat. But I’m nothing more than the presence of a man. A silly man trying hard to give energy to his features and firmness to his gaze.

  The following day, little Jacqueline comes looking for me. Near the outside of the courtyard wall, Madame Delaveau is talking with a group of soldiers. They surround one of those farm machines that look like an instrument of torture; it is a machine that pulls up weeds. She’s afraid they want to take it.

  “Ask them what they are doing …”

  I manage to make my “Warum” and “Was wollen Sie”b understood. But I understand nothing of their responses. They all speak at once and yell to be better understood. Nonetheless, the German language is sometimes intelligible. The word “reparieren” saved everything. One of the soldiers is in fact straightening one of the cultivator’s tines with a pair of pliers and an adjustable wrench. And I manage to gather that it had been hit by one of their trucks. But beforehand I had been very weak. The colossal corporal was passing by. He approached. I responded warmly to his “Guten Tag.” The others understood that we knew each other. I cravenly appeased the powerful.

  I know I almost sound as if I’m joking and relating the infinitesimal. But we never knew which of these small incidents would be the last. And one would like to think that in each of these contacts with the German conquerors, small as it might be, something of our dignity is involved. I pity anyone who doesn’t feel this. And if he is some kind of theorist in whom the presence of Germans arouses no sense of nationalism, I say I don’t like the prisoner who flatters his jailer.

  And the Germans are everywhere. Their life is superimposed on that of the village, overloading it. They can no more be avoided than a line of ants on a garden path. Their private conversations that resemble barking, their raucous commands, the sound of a single soldier’s boots, or a detachment marching in step, their singing in chorus, which is nothing but cadenced footfalls from their throats, drown out the countryside and drown out the village. Their trucks are still filing toward Paris, northward, each carrying on the front, atop the canvas roof, a figurehead, an ironic trophy: one of our gas masks.

  Two young girls are said to have been raped by soldiers in the woods. It’s more than unlikely this will ever be mentioned again.

  Under a sky sometimes deep blue, sometimes gray from passing clouds, I’m walking with Abel Delaveau on the farm’s little lane that runs perpendicular to the road. It’s unbelievable that a truck would leave the road and turn onto this path. Yet one of their trucks turns sharply onto the cart path without slowing down. We didn’t hear it. And the driver said nothing. He hit the brakes five meters from us and blew the horn. We only just had time to get out of the way. The driver is irate. For him there are no small lanes or country lanes or lanes reserved for horse carts or dreaming. There are only some universal rules of traffic.

  In the evening, a few soldiers form a circle around Madame Rose’s nephew. If this little boy wanted to describe Germans, he’d no doubt say Germans stole candy in order to bring him sweets. The soldiers point out with respect one of them who is a pastor and speaks French. If the pastor had been alone, who knows what he would have said to me. But our brief conversation was uninteresting. We agreed that Dresden is a beautiful city. (For that matter, I rarely heard the Germans talk about a city, even a foreign one, without adding that it’s beautiful.) And he asked if the French read Goethe.

  We return to our room. Not even the night is empty of Germans. The sentry and his boots pass in front of our window. But I love the sound, like bombing in the distance, of the farm horses bumping against their stalls.

  This morning, the fake aviator, the stool pigeon, accosted me in the hallway that leads to the farmhouse bedrooms … He approaches everyone the same way: “Excuse me … I want to improve myself in the French language …”

  He’s a strapping lad, a good-looking boy, with regular but flabby features, a saccharine face. Because I’ve been told he speaks French very fluently, I have the feeling that his difficulty finding words and embarrassed pronunciation are nothing but a ruse. Doubtless he wants to dispel my idea that he has been in France as a spy for a long time. In a few seconds I’m certain he’s no aviator but rather an informant or a gadfly. Above all, he’s an imbecile. He’s more of an imbecile than he is a German. He asks me questions about grammar and proper word usage. And doubtless to compensate me, he tells me about his stay in Paris, after the arrival of the Germans. “Paris is a beautiful city.” The three essential stops of his visit were Fouquet’s Restaurant, the Arc de Triomphe and Napoleon’s tomb.

  If he is a spy, he isn’t the stealthy kind that glides along walls. He’s clingy, frightfully clingy. He sticks.

  Abel Delaveau drove us into Montargis in his Citroën. But he was wise enough to also bring along the German soldier who guards the prisoners at Chapelon. The most straightforward men often show an unexpected cleverness in the worst of circumstances, when the clever get lost in detail. The German walks into the Kommandantur as if he were at home. He obtains a coupon for ten liters of gasoline. We go to the tanker. There’s no army, even the German army, whose disciplinary structure doesn’t conceal cracks that resourcefulness can slip through. Whether the German is acting out of kindness or vanity, I don’t know. We are given all the gasoline we can carry. We buy a watering can that we’ll stopper however we’re able, with bits of rag. Need I say that Abel shared this treasure with me? But I’m still thirty liters short of hoping to reach the Jura or the Saône-et-Loire.

  Women line up at store doors. But there’s no line for German soldiers. They go to the front. One sh
opkeeper, asked for I don’t know what foodstuff, says angrily, “The Parisians looted it all.” The Parisians, that’s the horde of refugees. The sentry in front of the Kommandantur roughly pushes away passersby. I’m already drawing vast ethnic conclusions, but I’m suddenly reminded of that French sergeant on the road in a frightened, authoritarian frenzy, yelling, flinging cart horses around by their bridles and taking out his rage on the gearboxes of cars. The terrace of the café is occupied solely by German officers, stiff in their chairs, like gilded idols stuck to the sidewalk.

  We find an edition of Le Matin. We read that “England coldly committed the greatest crime of all time,” that she “proved her bestial cruelty and, in a few hours, beat all records for collective criminality and moral baseness.”c We also read that General de Gaulle “has been discharged for his conduct.” A local newspaper, Le Gâtinais, reprints the provisions of the armistice.

  * The Virgin.

  † A reference to writers, coined in 1932 by Stalin when he ordered them to tailor their themes to serve the state.

  ‡ The Nazi party newspaper.

  § Duty … fatherland.

  ǁ Father-and-son singer-songwriters Éloi (1855–1938) and Gaston (1890–1981) Ouvrard popularized comic songs about military life.

  a Paul Reynaud (1878–1966), prime minister when Germany invaded, was a pro-business, center-right politician, but in the 1930s he endorsed military alliance with the Soviet Union.

  b Why … What do they want.

  c On July 3, 1940, in the port at Mers-el-Kébir, Algeria, negotiations to guarantee that French ships would not fall into German hands failed, and British vessels fired on the French fleet, killing 1,297 Frenchmen.

  V

  THE COLOSSAL CORPORAL.

  RETURN TO THE FREE ZONE