by Joe Moran
The Swedish and Finnish words for shyness, blyg and ujo, carry positive associations of being unassuming and willing to listen to others. Many Finnish proverbs point to the value of choosing words carefully and not saying any more than necessary: “One word is enough to make a lot of trouble.” “Brevity makes a good psalm.” “A barking dog does not catch a hare.” “One mouth, two ears.” According to the Finnish scholars Jaakko Lehtonen and Kari Sajavaara, in an essay on “the silent Finn,” the overuse among their compatriots of what linguists call backchannel behavior—nodding, eyebrow raising, saying “hmmm” while the other person is speaking—is considered intrusive and the preserve of drunks.7
The Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki’s characters are similarly sparing with speech. They work away silently in dull jobs at supermarket checkouts or kitchen sinks and drive through the country’s backroads, chain-drinking vodka while exchanging cryptic grunts. In The Match Factory Girl (1990) thirteen minutes pass, in a film just sixty-eight minutes long, before anyone speaks. In the lead-up to this momentous event, the heroine spends a day in the factory, goes home to cook and eat a meal with her parents, and attends a dance where the men ask women to tango by touching their hands, while she is ignored and sits holding her handbag in her lap. Eventually she goes into a bar and says three words: “A small beer.”
Even in the Nordic countries, silence can carry awkward or hostile subtexts. Ingmar Bergman, in his autobiography, attributes his stammering as a boy to the determination of grown-ups not to speak to a misbehaving child until the child was visibly contrite—a cold shoulder far more painful, he recalls, than the ensuing interrogation, wheedled-out confession, and ritual fetching of the carpet beater.8 The Swedes have a phrase for it: att tiga ihjäl (to kill by silence). Different cultures may view shyness in a different light and may differently assess what constitutes a healthy balance between talking and listening. But silence can be deadly in all of them.
Just before 10 p.m. on June 18, 1940, four days after the fall of Paris to the Germans, a man skilled in the art of the deadly silence sat in front of a microphone in studio 4B at Broadcasting House in London’s Portland Place. He was dressed in full French military uniform down to his leggings and thigh boots, having fled to England the previous day as his country brokered a humiliating armistice with the Nazis. The BBC engineer asked him to say something to test the sound level. He stared intently at the microphone and, in a deep, resonant voice, said two words: “La France.” He then sat in complete silence until the red light flashed to signal that they were live, when he began an emotional plea to his compatriots. “Has the last word been said? Must hope disappear? Is defeat final?” he said in a French that managed to sound hard-edged and guttural and yet also stirring and lyrical. “Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished, and it will not be extinguished.” The French have come to know the cadences of Charles de Gaulle’s “appel du 18 Juin” even better than English speakers know Winston Churchill’s “finest hour” speech, delivered in the House of Commons earlier that day.
De Gaulle’s mesmerizing personality owed much to his eloquence. Even when extemporizing in speeches or when answering questions from journalists, he spoke in jewel-like sentences, as if he had already drafted and redrafted them in his head. “Magnificent personality he sounds,” wrote Vere Hodgson, a welfare worker from Notting Hill, in her diary after listening to de Gaulle on the radio. “His voice is thrilling, and his answer to Pétain made me shiver in my chair. Such tragedy too in his tones.”9 It was his lapidary sentences and sonorous delivery that allowed this low-ranking officer, barely known in France and unknown in Britain, with an army of just a few thousand soldiers behind him, to rally his compatriots and lead his nation in exile.
But his extraordinary public performances were interspersed with long periods when he would simply say oui or non or nothing at all. In the French pub on Dean Street in Soho, where the scattered colony of exiles from across the Channel congregated, it was always crowded and noisy, the bonhomie overseen by a jovial patron, Victor Berlemont. When de Gaulle went there, he sat silently with a glass of wine while the French soldiers stood to attention and the room fell into an awkward hush.
It was as if de Gaulle’s bursts of eloquence required long periods of silence to recharge his energies and store up more words, or perhaps he had decided that if he could not speak in poetry, he would rather not speak at all. Most tongue-tied people cannot, as de Gaulle did, suddenly become fluent at will. Unable to think clearly when talking to others, we mangle our syntax, stumble over consonants, and function far below our mental powers. Our fear is that we are boring others—which makes us throw away our words quickly or trail off at the ends of sentences, so the fear becomes self-fulfilling. And yet de Gaulle never seemed to have this problem. He was silent or silver-tongued, nothing in between. It was maddening and magnetic, this refusal to make the most cursory effort at small talk and then to speak, on his own terms, so beautifully.
In May 1943, de Gaulle moved his headquarters to Algiers, wanting to be on French territory. Lady Diana Cooper, based there while her husband, Duff, was British representative to the French committee of liberation, found that table talk with de Gaulle “flowed like glue.” The Coopers christened him Charlie Wormwood after wormwood and gall, the symbols of bitterness in the Book of Lamentations. At formal dinners he and his wife, Yvonne, were a life-sapping pair. He was from Lille and she was from Calais, and they both lived up to the reputation of the northern French as reserved, like their neighbors across the Channel. The writer G. K. Chesterton thought the “shyness and moody embarrassment” of the English were also displayed by the northern French, with whom they shared an ancestry and history, for both lacked “the rapid gestures of the South.”10 The de Gaulles certainly lived up to this stereotype by recoiling at the tactility of Mediterraneans and disliking the familiar French tu, which they did not even use with each other all the time.
One Sunday in June 1943 the British minister in Algiers, Harold Macmillan, had a meeting with de Gaulle and afterward suggested that they drive to the coastal town of Tipasa for an afternoon off. There Macmillan stripped naked and went for a swim. De Gaulle declined to join him and “sat in a dignified manner on a rock, with his military cap, his uniform and belt.” Macmillan, who threw up before giving speeches but otherwise hid his own shyness well, was fascinated by “this strange—attractive yet impossible—character.” His wife, Dorothy, was stuck with looking after Yvonne. She said later that talking to her was “like digging at clay with a trowel.”11
De Gaulle’s shyness was quite genuine and much more than just rudeness. After being captured at Verdun in March 1916, he acquired over the next two and a half years of war a reputation among his fellow prisoners for natural leadership. So Ferdinand Plessy, a fellow POW at Ingolstadt and then Wülzburg, was astonished when de Gaulle confessed to him one evening that he was shy. Plessy could not square this with his friend’s natural eloquence and air of authority. But then he reflected that de Gaulle knew how to keep his distance. He remembered that the prisoners’ shower room had no partitions, just a duckboard with sprinklers overhead, and he had not once seen de Gaulle naked.12
De Gaulle hated his large nose, protruding ears, and receding chin and rarely looked in mirrors. He knew that, at nearly six foot five, he walked a thin line between grandeur and ungainliness. “We people are never quite at ease,” he told the French politician Louis Joxe. “I mean—giants. The chairs are always too small, the tables too low, the impression one makes too strong.”13 His sight was poor, and to read anything he had to wear bottle-bottom glasses, which he loathed. He so hated the telephone that not even his aides dared call him at his work desk, and his home phone was deliberately installed under the stairs so he had to contort his body to use it.
He could see that his shyness meant, for public appearances, that he would have to cultivate a rhetorical style. In notebooks written as a POW he was already sketching this out.
“One must speak little. In action one must say nothing,” he told himself. “The chief is the one who does not speak.” Unable to conduct social niceties, he acted only on the grand scale, veering between eloquent monologue and gravid silence. In fact, this public role extended so far into his private life that it was hard to know where the latter began. His son recalled that de Gaulle would emerge from his bedroom each morning in jacket and tie and that the only time he had ever seen him in a state of undress was after his prostate operation.14
If de Gaulle was devoid of personal vanity, he certainly nurtured a giant, impersonal superiority complex, referring to himself in the third person because he felt France’s representative on earth deserved respect. In the name of French prestige he insisted on leading the First Army into Paris in an open-topped car when, on August 26, 1944, the capital was liberated. Although he knew the city was still full of Germans and French collaborationists ready to take potshots, he went up to the Arc de Triomphe to lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and lead the singing of the “Marseillaise.” He walked the length of the Champs-Élysées down to the Place de la Concorde, where a car was waiting to take him to Notre-Dame, which was crammed full of people wanting to give thanks for the city’s liberation.
As de Gaulle got out of his car in the Parvis Notre-Dame, the first shots came from rooftops overlooking the square; bursts of answering fire came from the gendarmes. De Gaulle entered the nave with snipers firing from the high galleries and the congregation throwing themselves on the ground and hiding under the pews. His minders tried to hustle him away, but he shook them off and walked slowly down the center aisle, his shoulders back and his arms outstretched, as if the hail of bullets were no more than a slight drizzle and it wasn’t worth putting up an umbrella. “Nothing could be more important,” he wrote of this moment in his memoirs, “than for me not to yield to the panic of the crowd.”15
As gendarmes worked their way through the cathedral, watching for flashes from above and firing at them, bullets ricocheted off the cathedral’s pillars, and chips of stone flew through the air. There was no electricity for the organ, so the shots rang out a cappella. “The advantage of having an unattractive face is that it allows one to hide, and to master, the emotions that one might reveal in public,” de Gaulle said later.16 As he walked down the aisle and smelled the incense mingling with the whiff of cordite, he let his features settle into this unrevealing mask. Stirred by de Gaulle’s silent courage, the congregation calmed down and rose to sing the “Te Deum.”
From Homeric epic to Shakespeare’s Henry V, classic literature is full of loudmouthed generals delivering stirring words before a battle. Being slain in combat is also typically an occasion to say a few words: the laconic dying utterance is a leitmotif, for instance, in the Icelandic sagas. Real-life soldiers tend to be more taciturn. On the battlefield words weigh heavily. It is better to say nothing than to give a wrong order and send comrades to their deaths. This verbal parsimony often lingers after the battles are over, for people who have seen the worst of war are often the most reticent about it. There are no adequate words to describe a comrade’s blown-off face or shell-mangled body, and those who have witnessed such things feel unable to cross that inevitable gulf of incomprehension that divides them from noncombatants. As Siegfried Sassoon observed in his poem “Survivors,” muteness and stammering were common symptoms of soldiers suffering from shell shock. One of the early names for shell shock was “shell shyness.”
One day in Cairo in 1941, Charles de Gaulle met a soldier as shy as himself, when he was taken in to the office of Archibald Wavell, the British commander-in-chief, Middle East. The two men shook hands without speaking, and there was silence for several minutes. Wavell’s chief of staff, Major-General Sir Arthur Smith, tried to retrieve the situation by suggesting that Wavell show de Gaulle his wall map. The two men studied it silently for some minutes before they shook hands again and de Gaulle left—without a word having been said by either of them.17
Wavell’s crushing silences were as notorious as de Gaulle’s. He would doodle on a notepad while listening to his staff deliver messages or reports and then say in a dry, raspy voice, “I see” or “I should do that, if I were you.” In a series of lectures titled “Generals and Generalship,” delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, in February 1939, Wavell argued that although a commander should impress his personality upon his troops, he should address them only if he felt able to manage a fitting oration; a bad speech might lose his men in a few minutes. A soldier demanded competence of his leader and such small anodynes as the harsh conditions of war could afford. Only after these basic needs were met did he look for thrilling oratory, and he could live without the oratory if he had the rest. Certainly, the wall of reserve that lay between Wavell and his troops did not stop him from conveying wisdom, integrity, and even charisma. Diana Cooper, who had felt so depleted by de Gaulle, said of Wavell that she “might fall in love with him if I got over my fear of his silences.”18
As a brigade major in the Ypres Salient in the First World War, Wavell visited every part of the front line and listened to his men—the antithesis of the red-faced, barking generals in Sassoon’s poems. His shyness had made him a contrarian, suspicious of masculine bluster and the overconfident parroting of fixed ideas. He deplored the way that men were dying because high command clung mulishly to unsheltered and boggy trenches and refused to move troops back or sideways to more solid chalk or better-defended positions. The massacre at Bellewaarde Ridge in June 1915 convinced him of the stupidity of static trench warfare and massed attacks by foot soldiers against entrenched positions and of the need to find more creative ways of waging war. During the battle he lost his left eye, and his habit ever after of looking intently at people with his one good eye while not speaking, his glower augmented by the monocle placed over it, fed his reputation for impassivity and unreadability.
Later in the war Wavell served in Palestine under the commander-in-chief of the Middle East, General Allenby, whose novel use of military deception he came to admire. In October 1917, Wavell witnessed the famous ruse in which a bloodstained haversack full of false papers was left for the Turks to pick up, misleading them about which flank the British were about to attack in Gaza. He was also inspired by the unorthodox tactics of T. E. Lawrence, another soldier whose deep introversion had incubated a lateral-thinking mind. In 1920, Lawrence wrote a pioneering treatise on guerrilla warfare, “The Evolution of a Revolt,” in which he argued that armies should not be static but drift around like a gas, intangible and invisible. “Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head,” he wrote. “We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed.”19
The historian Nicholas Rankin argues that the British talent for military deception so brilliantly fulfilled in the two world wars grew out of a national character that valued self-deprecation and concealment. The native tradition of speaking cryptically and masking seriousness with irony or jokes as “a cover for shyness or sentiment” allowed the British to excel in the dark arts of espionage, the code breaking of Bletchley Park, and military tactics based on forgery and false rumor.20
When Italy entered the Second World War on June 10, 1940, Wavell had only 36,000 troops stationed in Egypt against 150,000 Italian troops in Libya. The Axis powers were on an unbroken run of victories, and another rout seemed likely. Wavell concluded that the enemy would have to be met with unconventional thinking. In late summer he had an intelligence officer, Dudley Clarke, posted to his staff and asked him to set up “A” Force, an organization dedicated to the art of military deception. Clarke had encountered Wavell three years earlier, when he first came under his command in Palestine. During a long drive from Jerusalem to Haifa, Wavell asked him when he had joined up, and Clarke replied, “1916, sir.” An hour later, Wavell said, “I meant when did you join this Headquarters?”21 Clarke came to value this unwillingness to waste words.
While waiting for reinforcements to
arrive, Wavell and Clarke now began to turn their English flair for shyness and social disguise into a military strategy. Their plan was to use concealment and artifice to make the Italians think the region was swarming with Desert Rats—soldiers of the British Army’s Seventh Armoured Division. A small team of camouflage experts, headed by the magician and illusionist Jasper Maskelyne, went to work. They made inflatable warships and papier-mâché horses and turned trucks into tanks by covering them with painted canvas. They tied telephone poles to oil drums and threw netting over them to make what looked like big guns from the air. They dolled up patches of desert to look like airfields and roads. They raced camels dragging harrows across the desert to kick up dust clouds like those created by tanks. Meanwhile, the ack-ack guns kept the Italian planes at high altitude, so the enemy could not inspect the imaginary army too closely. The literal-minded Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, Italy’s commander-in-chief in North Africa, fell for it. On September 13 the Italian Tenth Army crossed gingerly into Egypt, but after just fifty miles it stopped at the small coastal town of Sidi Barrani and dug in.