The French Art of War

by Alexis Jenni

  Sencey was taken because it had to be taken. The Colonel insisted, so he could mark the advance on his map. Seizing a town is the greatest military action, even if it is a sleepy little village in Maçon during the afternoon siesta. They advanced, heads down, evading the bullets the machine gun fired too high. They took cover in doorways. They crawled along the walls, crouched behind boundary stones, making themselves so small they completely disappeared, but when they came to the main road, they could go no farther.

  Brioude moved forwards in little bounds, his legs bent, his back horizontal, the fingers of his left hand resting on the ground, his right hand gripping his Sten gun; his knuckles were white from squeezing this gun that had, as yet, seen little action. Behind him, Roseval was also stooped; then came Salagnon and the others, spread out along the walls, sheltering in corners, behind stone benches, in doorways. The streets of Sencey were gravel paths, the walls were pale stone; every surface reflected the glare. The heat was visible, a rippling haze, and they were on the move, squinting against the light, sweat trickling down their backs, down their faces, down their arms; even their hands were slick with sweat, but they wiped them on their shorts, so as not to lose their grip on their guns.

  Every door and shutter in the village was closed. They did not see a living soul. They would deal with the Germans without a single inhabitant getting involved. But sometimes as they passed a doorway, this procession of men in white shirts moving in little bounds, the door would open and a hand – they only ever saw the hand – would set a full bottle on the doorstep, then the door would close with a ridiculous sound, the clack of a latch amid the crackle of bullets. They drank and passed it along, it was chilled wine or water, and the last in the line would set the bottle on a window ledge. They continued to advance along the main street. They needed to cross the road. The stones gave off a white heat, searing their eyes and their hands. The German machine gun at the far end fired at random, at the slightest movement. On the far side of the street, shady alleyways offered shelter. They could be there in two bounds.

  Brioude gestured to the street. He spun his wrist twice to signify the two bounds and pointed to the alley on the other side. Crouching, silent, the others nodded. Brioude bounded, dived and rolled to safety. A hail of bullets followed, but came too late and too high. He was already on the other side; he waved to them. Roseval and Salagnon set off together, running quickly. Salagnon thought he felt a rush of air from the approaching bullets. He was not sure whether bullets could create a rush of air; perhaps it was just a sound or simply the effect of his running; he sat down heavily against the shady wall, his chest about to explode, panting for breath after two quick bounds. The sun was splitting the stones, the glare from the street was painful; on the far side the crouching men hesitated. In this sweltering silence every gesture became stultified and slow; Brioude was beckoning insistently, soundlessly, as though at the bottom of a swimming pool. Mercier and Bourdet made the leap, the hail of bullets caught Mercier in full flight, hit him in mid-air like a racquet striking a ball and he landed on his belly. A pool of blood unfurled beneath him. Bourdet could not stop shaking. Brioude signalled for them to stop; the others on the far side froze, hunkered in the sunlight, while those who had managed to cross followed him down the alley.

  Mercier’s body still lay in the street. The machine gun fired again, aiming lower this time, and the gravel around him danced, several bullets hit the body with a sound of hammer on flesh, the corpse juddered with spurts of blood and torn fabric.

  In the backstreets, among stone houses, in the shadows and the silence, they took no precautions, they simply ran. They happened on two Germans stretched out behind a well, their gun trained on the main street. Pointed in the wrong direction. Alerted by the sound of running footsteps behind them, they turned, but too late. Brioude, leading the charge, fired instinctively, holding his Sten gun at arm’s length, as though protecting himself from something, as though he were stumbling in the dark, afraid he might bump into something; he was thin-lipped, his eyes reduced to narrow slits. The two Germans crumpled, slowly bleeding to death, their helmets askew, but the maquisards did not slow, they bounded over the corpses, racing towards the hidden machine gun.

  They managed to get close, they could see helmets above the sandbags and the moving, perforated barrel. Roseval quickly lobbed a grenade and threw himself on the ground. His toss fell short. The grenade rolled to the sandbags and exploded, raising a cloud of dirt and gravel that hovered over their heads; shards of metal fell with a dull clang. When the dust had settled, the four men looked again. The helmets and the gun had disappeared. Checking, they crept slowly forwards, circled the gun post until they could be sure there was nothing there. Only then did they stand up straight. Sencey had been captured.

  From the doorway of the church they looked at the patchwork of fields and hedges. The meadows gently rolled down towards Porquigny. They could just make out the train station and beyond it the tree-lined banks of the Saône, and the valley, bleached by the sunlight, almost dissolved in the dazzling air. Three trucks were jolting away along the road to Porquigny. Sun flashed intermittently from the windscreens as they encountered hills and bends. Twin columns of smoke rose above the asphalt from what must have been trains.

  In front of the entrance to the church, on the outermost edge of the village from where one had a vista of the surrounding countryside, Salagnon had to sit down; his muscles were twitching; his legs no longer had the strength to carry him; he was sweating profusely. Water poured out of him as though his skin were made of gauze; he was streaming with sweat. It reeked, it was sticky. Sitting down, both hands holding his gun tightly so that at least it did not tremble, he thought about Mercier, abandoned in the streets, killed randomly, almost by accident. But it was inevitable that one among them should die, it was the age-old rule, and he felt the extraordinary joy, the extraordinary absurdity, of having survived.

  Capturing Porquigny was easy. They had only to follow the paths downhill, hide among the bushes. At Porquigny they would reach the train tracks, the trunk road, the Saône; and there they would meet the new French army and the Americans marching north as quickly as their heavy kitbags would allow.

  They crept through the meadows, came to the outlying houses. Sheltering behind corners, they listened. Pestered by fat, sluggish blowflies, they shooed them away with little waves. The only sound was the buzzing of the flies. The air around them rippled, but air that shimmers in the heat makes no sound: it is visible; it warps lines and shapes, making it difficult to see; you find yourself blinking rapidly to unstick tangled eyelashes, then wiping your eyes with a sweaty hand. The stifling air makes no sound; it is the flies. In the little village of Porquigny flies gathered in listless swarms and buzzed continually. Only broad gestures could shoo them and even then they barely reacted, flying off only to land again on the same spot. They had no fear of threats, nothing could keep them away; they stuck to faces, arms, hands, to every surface slick with sweat. In the village the air quivered with a muggy heat and with flies.

  The first body they saw was a woman lying on her back; her pretty dress lay spread around her, as though she had held it wide before lying down. She was about thirty years old and looked as if she came from the city. She might have come here on holiday or was perhaps the village schoolmistress. In death her eyes were wide and she retained an air of serene independence, assurance and sophistication. The wound to her belly was not bleeding, but the red scab slashed across her dress quivered with a thick velvet of flies.

  They found the others in the church square, lined up along the walls, crumpled in half-open doors; several piled on to a cart hitched to a horse that stood motionless but for its blinking eyes, its twitching ears. The flies moved from corpse to corpse, forming chance eddies, their buzzing filling the village.

  The maquisards moved forwards warily, remaining in strict formation, mindful as never before of the distance between them. The pulsing air left no place for sound,
so much so that they forgot they were gifted with the power of speech. Instinctively, they covered their noses and mouths to ward off the smell and the flies; and also to demonstrate to their comrades that the sight had left them speechless, unable to say a word. By their count, they found twenty-eight bodies in the streets of Porquigny. The only male was a boy of sixteen in a white, open-neck shirt, his forehead slashed by a fringe of blond hair, his hands tied behind his back. The back of his head had been shattered by a bullet fired at close range; it had spared his face. Flies teemed only on the back of his skull.

  They left Porquigny, heading for the train station built further down the hill, beyond meadows pitted with dense thickets, behind a line of poplar trees. They heard a shriek across the sky and the ground in front of them was pockmarked by a perfect line of small explosions. The earth shuddered and they stumbled. Then they heard the dull crack of shots fired. There was a second salvo; explosions echoed all around them, showering them with dirt and damp splinters. They took shelter behind the trees, some dashed back towards the village, others lay on the ground. ‘The armoured train!’ yelled Brioude, but no one heard in the thunderous bombardment; his voice did not carry and it was every man for himself. The ground shook, thick smoke mingled with earth settled slowly, small shards of debris rained like hail around them, over them; they were deafened, blinded, panicked, and they raced towards the village, thinking of nothing but getting away.

  When they reached the houses again, some of them were missing. The salvoes stopped. They heard the roar of the engine. Through the curtain of poplars came three Tiger tanks, moving up the hill towards Porquigny, leaving deep ruts of churned earth; behind them came men in grey, protected by huge panels whose ceaseless metallic grating they could hear.

  The first shell punctured a window and exploded inside a house, bringing the roof down. The beams gave way, the roof tiles tumbled in a jangling of terracotta and a plume of reddish dust rose above the ruins and rolled through the streets.

  The maquisards sought refuge in the houses. Behind the tanks, the grey-uniformed soldiers marched, heads low so as not to make easy targets. They marched in step; they did not fire, did not leave themselves open to attack; they allowed the tanks to clear the way. The young French boys in white shirts so eager to fight were about to be crushed like shells by the huge steel jaws of a nutcracker. Not so much by the machines themselves as by the discipline.

  Once within range, the bullets from their machine guns bounded off the thick armour with even denting. The Tiger tanks lumbered forwards, flattening the grass. When they fired, their whole bulk reared up with a sigh and in front of them a wall disintegrated.

  Roseval and Salagnon had taken shelter in a house, having kicked open the front door. A family with no husband, no sons, was huddled in the kitchen. Roseval went to reassure them, while Salagnon stood by the door, studying the elegant lines of the gun turret as it slowly advanced, slowly turned, training its great dark eye on everything. A direct hit obliterated the kitchen. Salagnon was covered with dust; the only thing that remained standing was the door jamb – the door had been ripped from its hinges. Protected by a thick wall of stone, Salagnon was unscathed. He watched as the tank advanced, followed by battle-hardened soldiers; though he could see their weapons, he still could not see faces, but they were moving towards him. Covered in dust, cowering behind a wall of teetering stones, he watched vigilantly as if vigilance could save him.

  The three planes came from the south, a white star painted on their fuselage. They were not flying very high and the roar as they passed was the sound of a sky being ripped asunder. They made the sound one expects when the sky is ripped asunder, for only a sky ripped through every layer can produce this sound that makes you cower, convinced there is nothing more powerful; and yet there is. They passed a second time, firing heavy shells at the Tiger tanks, explosive shells that sent up showers of earth and gravel and ricocheted off their armour with a loud clang. They banked with the deafening roar of huge circular saws and headed south. The tanks turned around, the battle-hardened soldiers still sheltering behind them. The maquisards stayed in their makeshift shelters, which had miraculously remained standing, listening intently, waiting for the sound of the engines to fade. The silence was filled by the continual drone of the flies they had forgotten.

  When the first Zouaves arrived in the village, the maquisards emerged, blinking, into the light. They hugged their guns, warm and sticky with sweat, staggered as though after a heroic effort, an overwhelming exhaustion, as though they had spent the night drinking and now it was morning. They waved wildly to the green soldiers marching between the Sherman tanks, weighed down by their kitbags, their rifles slung over their shoulders, their heavy helmets hiding their eyes.

  The boys hugged the soldiers of the Armée Africaine, who returned their effusive greetings with kindness and patience, having become accustomed in recent weeks to the joy triggered by their arrival. They spoke French, but with a cadence unfamiliar to the boys, in a tone they had never heard before. He had to strain to understand and it made Salagnon laugh, since he had never imagined anyone might talk this way. ‘It’s funny, the way they talk,’ he said to the Colonel. ‘You’ll see, Salagnon. The African French are sometimes difficult to understand. You’ll often be surprised, and not always in a good way,’ he muttered, pulling his Saharan scarf tighter and adjusting his sky-blue kepi to the precise angle required by sky-blue.

  Salagnon, exhausted, lay down on the grass; above him floated perfectly delineated clouds. They hung suspended in the air with the majesty of mountains, with the aloofness of a snow-capped peak. How can so much water hover in the air? he wondered. Lying on his back, alert to the ebb and flow coursing through his limbs, he could think of no better question to ask. He realized now that he had felt fear; but a fear so great that he would never again feel fear. The part of him that made it possible to feel afraid had been snapped in two and swept away.

  The Zouaves set up camp around Porquigny. They had an extravagant quantity of equipment, which arrived in trucks and was unloaded in the meadows. They set up their tents in regimented lines, stacked up piles of green crates stencilled in white with English words. Tanks were parked in rows as effortlessly as automobiles.

  Salagnon, exhausted, sitting on the grass, watched as the camp took shape, as vehicles arrived, as hundreds of men went about the business of setting things up. Rolling past came tanks with rounded, toad-like bodies; all-terrain vehicles with no sharp corners; sullen trucks with bovine musculature; soldiers wearing pith helmets and loose-fitting uniforms, their baggy trousers flaring over laced-up boots. Everything was a murky frog green, a little muddy as though it had just emerged from a pond. American equipment uses organic lines, he thought, it is designed like skin over muscle, with forms well adapted to the human body. The Germans, on the other hand, think in grey, bulky forms, better designed, more striking, as inhuman as sheer will, as angular as irrefutable arguments.

  His mind empty, Salagnon began to see shapes. In his idle brain his talent resurfaced. At first he pictured lines, tracing them with the mute, delicate concentration of a hand. Army life fosters such mental blanks, or imposes them on the unwilling.

  The Colonel, a man who was unfailingly thoughtful, rallied his men. He ordered a search for the bodies left in the meadows, ploughed up by shells, and beneath the ruined houses. The wounded were carried to the field hospital tent. Salomon Kaloyannis dealt with everything. The surgeon-major welcomed, triaged, operated. This affable little man seemed to heal with the simple laying on of hands that were gentle, articulate. With his preposterous accent – this was the word that occurred to Salagnon – and too many words, he had the seriously wounded settled in the tent, while the others were lined up on canvas chairs set out on the grass. He constantly barked orders to a tall, moustached man he called Ahmed, who invariably answered in a soft voice, ‘Yes, Doctor,’ before repeating the orders in a language that could only be understood by the brawny, dark-skinned men
, the stretcher-bearers and nurses, who dealt with the wounded with sure, swift movements made easier by habit. Ahmed, whose moustache and thick bushy eyebrows made him fearsome, ministered to the patients with extraordinary gentleness. A young maquisard with an injured arm, who had spent hours without uttering a word, cradling his bloody limb, sustained by sheer rage, broke down in tears as soon as Ahmed, with delicate strokes, began to clean the wound with a cotton swab.

  A nurse in a white smock brought bandages and bottles of antiseptic to the tent. She talked to the wounded men in a sing-song voice and used a firm tone to relay instructions from the busy surgeon-major to the male nurses; they assented in their thick accents and smiled as she passed. She was very young and attractively curved. Salagnon, who thought in shapes, followed her with his eyes at first, dreamily, giving free rein to his talent. She strove to remain impersonal, but did not quite succeed. A curl spilled out of her scraped-back hair; her curves spilled out of her tightly buttoned smock; her sensuous lips spilled out of the serious air she tried to adopt. Her womanliness spilled out of her, radiated from her every gesture, emanated from her every breath; but she did her utmost to play the role of a nurse.

  All the men in the Zouave regiment knew her by name. Like them, she was doing her best in this summer war, which they were constantly winning; she had earned her place among them; she was Eurydice, the daughter of Dr Kaloyannis, and no one failed to greet her when she passed. Victorien Salagnon would never know whether falling in love with Eurydice in that moment depended on circumstances or on the woman herself. But perhaps individuals are simply the circumstances in which they appear. Would he have noticed her in the streets of Lyon that he moved through, unseeing, among the thousand passing women? Or did he notice her because she was the only woman among a thousand exhausted men? It hardly matters; people are their environment. And so, one day in 1944, as Salagnon dreamed only of lines, as a weary Victorien Salagnon thought only in shapes, as his prodigious talent returned and his hands were finally free, he saw Eurydice Kaloyannis walk past; he never took his eyes off her again.