I would head up onto the city walls, after happily losing myself in a labyrinth of little streets on the way there, and was soon familiar with the views from every angle. A profound silence lent some quartiers an unreal atmosphere. Everywhere, it was as if I were in a dream. The city’s sleepy peacefulness won me over. I no longer read any newspapers, and I avoided the radio, which was not yet ubiquitous in Avignon.
In the afternoons, crossing the Rhône, I would sit down on one of those great flat slabs of stone on the riverbank, brought there in ancient times, so I’m told, by the town’s inhabitants, and remaining their private property. People came here to enjoy the coolness of the river.
I would contemplate the spectacle of the bridge and the Château des Papes, sometimes by day, under the blinding light of the sun, sometimes as dusk smudged the outlines of the old town, turning it into a mirage.
From time to time I would sit in the small public garden. Despite the war, it was maintained, blooming and carefully manicured by the old municipal gardener. Swans glided majestically on the two ponds, children played, carefree; the very elderly would exchange naïve remarks: ‘Have you read the papers?’ ‘We’ll beat them, just like we did in 1918.’ ‘They won’t try to get all the way down here!’ ‘In Marseille they’re saying …’ ‘Did you hear on the radio?’
Then, already exhausted from the effort, they would resume their siesta, fall asleep or speak of something else. It was its own little world, composed of the regulars at the town square, the retirees, the rentiers, the residents from the old people’s home.
One afternoon in the oppressive heat, I was walking down an out-of-the-way little street. I had stopped to admire the pure style of the door and balcony of a house. Around me reigned absolute silence. I stood there, losing all notion of time and place. Suddenly a sweet little window opened slightly and a dear old lady said in a gentle, friendly voice:
‘It’s very hot today, Madame, is it not? Won’t you do me the pleasure of accepting a little cider? It’s very refreshing!’
Taking her up on this unexpected invitation, I went in. And so I had the chance to spend an afternoon in a home furnished with the most marvellous antiques. The floor was tiled in exquisite mosaic; the ceiling decorated with cupids, flowers and crests. The furniture was several centuries old. Portraits of imposing family ancestors stared down at me …
As for the cider, it was served to me in a goblet made of silver and gold, a gift from an Avignon Pope to one of his noble lords. It was a sacred vessel with the power to protect its owner from the plague that had then been raging through Avignon.
‘It will protect you from the enemy,’ said the aristocratic lady to me, smiling.
I discovered that she knew me by sight and was aware I had fled to her town ahead of the occupying forces.
I took my leave from this kindly hostess late in the day and was made to promise to return.
On my way home, I glimpsed myself in the reflection of a large modern store and felt quite disoriented: all too suddenly, I found myself back in the twentieth century.
My forays into the past could not, however, make me forget the reality of war. Poland, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, all these invaded countries were like pieces of the planet that had been wrenched off, with no hope of contact, and only infrequent and distant signs of devastation and suffering still making their way through to us.
My despair for my family knew no bounds; I could see no end to it.
France, too, was bleeding. Even though people tried to recall the years of 1914–1918 and readily conjured up memories of the Marne, present times defied the drawing of any comparison. All one could see was a world collapsing.
IV
Vichy
But very quickly, distressing anxiety took hold of me again.
I lost all contact with the past and again found myself abruptly facing the full horror of reality, the reality of war.
When my cousins, who had fled from Belgium, announced that they had just arrived in Vichy and suggested I join them, I felt a real hunger to see these members of my family again.
My kindly professor, ever the philosopher, discouraged me from setting out; he advised me to trust to Fate and to wait, calmly, on the banks of the Rhône, for events to unfold.
While acknowledging the wisdom of his counsel, I could, however, no longer stay put. I needed a change of scene, too, and I was drawn to the mere idea of a move.
I sent my two suitcases ahead and took the train for Vichy. It took twenty hours to reach Clermont-Ferrand, going through Nîmes.
Along the way, I gazed in wonder at the Cévennes mountains, with their bewitching golden carpets of broom flowers, as we followed the river Allier, which seemed to be accompanying us.
The train stopped frequently, passengers would get off to stretch their legs; they bought bread, cheese and fruit from the local farmers. A sense of congenial camaraderie hung in the air. It felt like an escape from more serious concerns.
Soldiers joined us everywhere along the way. Most of them were heading to Clermont-Ferrand, others were returning home; large numbers were making their way to their designated mustering stations.
I remember an officer, entering our compartment, saying: ‘No point going any further, you poor so-and-sos! You’re better off turning around and heading back to where you’ve come from. There’s fighting at Moulins! The Germans have occupied most of France!’
Nobody took his pronouncements seriously! We knew the Germans had been in Paris since the fourteenth of June! How could they have crossed the whole of the north of France and made it across the Loire in just a few days?
But once we arrived in Clermont-Ferrand, we discovered that German troops were indeed making their way up the river Allier. There was widespread consternation!
I had no choice but to join my cousins as quickly as possible. I departed for Vichy on a train that had been scheduled out of timetable for the few passengers present. Already, all regular connections had been interrupted.
It was around six o’clock in the morning when I arrived at my destination. I made my way to their house and from a distance I could see my cousin busy attaching a mattress to his car with ropes. Next to him were several bundles. Seeing me, he lifted his arms heavenwards:
‘You poor thing! What are you doing here in Vichy? We sent you a telegram telling you to abandon any idea of travel!’
I replied, ‘That’s possible, but nothing ever reached me.’
Such was my arrival in Vichy.
After embracing my cousins, I set about preparing for our departure, along with everybody else. At ten o’clock we took our position in the queue of cars heading for Clermont-Ferrand.
Out on the highway, cars were moving four abreast. Everywhere there were trucks laden with women, children and the elderly. Perched on chairs, the old people were balancing a child, a cat, a dog, a cage, baskets or loaves of bread on their laps. Next to them, livestock, rabbits.
As far as the eye could see, cyclists were hemmed in by more trucks, horse-drawn vehicles, and automobiles covered in mattresses.
In front of us was a car with its back window broken. Every second moment, an old lady would anxiously call through the hole to ask, ‘Are my animals still there?’ On the luggage rack was a box with rabbits, a cat in a basket and canaries in a cage. We reassured the dear woman.
The line of cars was advancing at a rate of a kilometre every hour. From time to time we would get out and walk along the side of the road. And when we did, we could see the stream of evacuees disappearing into the distance.
At one point, soldiers appeared from the opposite direction. As the road was completely blocked, they were making their way as best they could through the fields. They shouted out to us, ‘We’re heading for Moulins … they’re fighting there. There’s no point pushing on to Clermont-Ferrand, you lot. Not only is there nowhere to stay and nothing to eat, even the water supply is starting to run out … As for petrol, not a drop!’
They seem
ed jaded. Many of them were walking in old slippers and carrying their boots tied by a string from their shoulder.
Further on, heading up fifty-odd artillerymen who were just as weary as the foot soldiers preceding them, we came across several trucks, on top of which were perched French 75 guns! The refugees’ vehicles had to pull over onto the shoulders to make room for them.
The troop movement must have been spotted by German reconnaissance planes. Shortly afterwards, a clamour broke out: ‘Aeroplanes, aeroplanes!’ The Clermont-Ferrand anti-aircraft defence fired. A few German bombs fell. People dashed, pell-mell, for the ditches.
Once the line of people started to move again, my cousin decided, ‘If Clermont-Ferrand is packed to the rafters with people fleeing, it makes more sense to return to Vichy, especially as I wouldn’t have enough petrol to return from Clermont.’
We agreed and, at the first turn off, he put his foot down and headed back to Vichy. We were very surprised to see the number of other evacuees who followed us.
We returned to a silent and mournful Vichy.
We expected the Germans to arrive at any moment.
The scouts ahead of the invasion had made it as far as the town hall.
The first to arrive at six o’clock in the evening were numerous motorcycles, followed shortly afterwards by artillery, tanks, cavalry and foot soldiers, then a multitude of trucks.
The occupation of Vichy was underway. That evening, the whole town was talking about the thousands of baths the Germans had ordered, not only in hotels but even at the thermal spring establishment, not to mention the innumerable bottles of champagne consumed.
The occupying forces left the town’s administration in the hands of the French authorities for the time being. They had other matters to attend to.
Numerous covered trucks passed through the town heading for unknown destinations. When they lifted their tarpaulins to load fresh booty, one could see the provisions piled high inside.
One day, a crowd of eager children had gathered around one such truck. I saw that the vehicle had been filled with blocks of Menier chocolate.
The trucks would frequently pull up in front of the abattoir and people would watch the Germans carry off the freshly slaughtered carcasses of entire beasts. Then the housewives would take up their position in line at the butchers in order to buy a thin slice of meat.
That was still the Golden Age, though: meat every day, and up to seventy-five grams at a time.
The population of Vichy was still leading an autonomous existence. People were happy merely to avoid the occupying forces. One stayed away from the cafés they frequented. People left shops, abandoning their shopping on the counter, if one of them came through the door.
The Germans enjoyed buying stockings, but not, on any account, they would say, ‘artificial silk’. In the confectioners’ they would eat cakes and ice-creams by the dozen and would exclaim, thinking nobody could understand them: ‘And to think it only costs four pfennigs each! Isn’t it a scream!’
While the privates would buy anything they could lay their hands on in the shops, the officers, sparkling in their immaculate uniforms, would fill the seats on the terraces of the grand ice-cream cafés, downing bottles of champagne from morning onwards.
The occupiers had not yet acquired the ‘art of consumption’.
Locals, refugees, demobilised soldiers, they all went past in the streets, observing this unfamiliar spectacle. Everybody grew increasingly irritable with every day that passed, complaining about everyone and everything: about daily hardships, difficulties in getting in supplies, the hard times, the bleak future, the daily spectacle of the enemy, the country’s leaders and the abyss into which we had all been plunged.
Bitterness filled the hearts of the French.
A bitterness that was to rise like the tide across occupied France.
The handsome post office, the pride and joy of Vichy locals, kept its doors and windows obstinately shut. Every day, crowds walked past, ‘just to check’.
How great the joy, then, when at last the post office reopened and one could send first cards, then letters. People would write sitting down, standing up, at the counters, outside the post office, sitting on benches. People were writing everywhere, and everybody was writing. People who had never enjoyed holding a pen were sending cards in these isolating times; everybody was feeling the need for family, friends, for human relationships.
With correspondence attended to, then came the impatient wait for replies. From morning to evening, there would be fifty to eighty people stationed in front of the two counters open for that purpose.
An old gentleman with a handsome head of white hair, who was my neighbour from the bench in the park, would take up his position in line every day too, leaning on his cane, and each time he would go away empty-handed. I put his disappointment down to the slowness of the postal system.
‘Still nothing?’ I said to him one day, as we left the post office together.
‘The truth of the matter is, I’m not waiting for letters. But time passes more quickly at the post office, in the company of others, and standing in front of the counter, well, that in itself is enough to make one feel a little hopeful,’ he replied, in all seriousness.
One day, a lad of about ten years lined up. He duly waited his turn.
‘Poor little thing,’ commented the lady ahead of me, turning back to address me (for there would be many a good chat), ‘he has probably been torn away from his family.’
When it came his turn at the counter, the boy asked the clerk for a strip of sticky tape. He was sharply rebuked. The exodus had brought him to Vichy and, while waiting to be reunited with his family, he was playing ‘postman’ with some other youngsters and he absolutely had to have sticky tape for the stamps in this game of make-believe.
An old lady came to bring back to the counter a letter she had opened but which was not addressed to her. The clerk asked:
‘Aren’t you Madame Guilloux, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘Madeleine?’
‘No, Marie.’
‘Why did you take the letter?’
‘You handed it to me, Sir, and the sender might have made a mistake.’
‘What? Your own family, make a mistake? Don’t they know your first name?’ said the clerk, severely.
‘You know, it’s easy to lose track of things in these times of war.’
‘True enough,’ said the clerk in a conciliatory tone.
The post office clerk, moreover, was delighted with his task. For a letter received, a cigarette would be discretely left as a sign of gratitude, accompanied by a complicit smile or an emotional ‘Merci’. Sometimes, however, there were nothing but explanations! ‘Why isn’t such-and-such a letter here yet?’ – ‘It’s odd it has taken so long to arrive!’ – ‘It’s the war,’ came his invariable reply, patient and philosophical.
The post office served not only as the major form of contact with the world, the miraculous invention that channelled the voice of somebody who had disappeared, an appeal, a response, it also served to fill the overwhelming hours of emptiness. It replaced the solitude with vague hope and created a form of human solidarity among those gathered at the counter. People would speak to each other as they left or greet each other in the street with a ‘Bonjour’.
The loneliness of those weeks was a dreadful burden evident on faces at the station, at the post office, on park benches, on café terraces, everywhere.
I had decided to return immediately to Avignon by train. But the day after the Occupation, the doors to the railway station were closed and a sign announced the suspension of regular trains until further notice.
Thus began a daily pilgrimage to the station.
The fateful sign remained in place for days on end. Looking through the grille, one could see trains, but each time, the hope of being able to take one was met with disappointment: they were all trains that had been commandeered for use by the Germans or as food supply convoys
.
During that time of military occupation, I was fortunate to find a room boarding with railway workers, right on the edge of town. It was a sweet little cottage, surrounded by flowers, the result of two generations of workers’ savings; but a magnificent municipal abattoir had subsequently been erected immediately opposite. When the wind blew towards the house, it carried with it the acrid smell of blood. The mournful bellowing of the beasts could be heard day and night. The proximity of such neighbours weighed on me strangely.
With the armistice signed, my cousins had returned to Belgium.
I had stayed, alone, separated from my family, from my friends, lost in an abyss of melancholy.
The two suitcases I had sent from Avignon arrived just as I was contemplating leaving. I had grown accustomed to the most primitive habits in the last six weeks. And so the clothes that arrived felt superfluous.
At last regular trains for the general public resumed.
One cannot begin to imagine the scene of my departure from Vichy!
As soon as the first train was announced – in fact, it turned out to be goods wagons – thousands of people prepared to leave. First the refugees, whom fate had abandoned there in their flight, those who had come to the springs for their cure and whom the war had surprised in Vichy, demobilised soldiers, among them the injured, all of whom had been held up there for weeks, they all wished to leave. Many Vichy locals were also hoping to seek refuge with relatives or friends, in order to get out of the Occupied Zone.
Those wishing to travel positioned themselves immediately outside and around the railway station, as well as on the embankment along the tracks.
Red Cross refreshment stalls had opened up here and there, offering coffee, bread, cheese and fruit.
Refugees and soldiers sat eating on the ground, their food spread out simply on newspapers. At night, their knapsacks served as pillows.
Whenever a convoy was announced, people would rouse themselves into action; sometimes, as it pulled in to the station, a train would have to slow down to allow the crowd time to clear the tracks. The stationmaster would shout and gesticulate, waving his flag, ringing a bell. People would respond: ‘All right, all right … We’re moving, … we’re moving! My, how that stationmaster carries on! We’ve been waiting long enough for the train!’
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