by Michel Déon
The priest once again about-turned, impervious to the threatening silence that accompanied his reading and private prayers. He was like a tightrope walker exorcising his vertigo at the war to right and left and keeping his balance on the high wire with a long pole, in this case, his prayer book, the word of the Church. At that hour, with the day still undecided, a priest’s innocence and the word of the Church seemed truly supernatural. They held the guns silent, forbade bloodshed, and returned to its state of French grace the whole tract of peaceful countryside whose colours were beginning to awaken. Everyone felt the moment, except for Tuberge, who grumbled something about fifth columnists and parachutists disguised as priests, then picked up a light machine gun and raked the black cassock with a volley of fire. The priest’s hands flew to his flushed face, and his body, after a moment’s hesitation, toppled into the canal, joining the dead cow whose horns had become tangled in the weeds. As the echo of the machine gun died away a sudden breeze sprang up, rippling the surface of the canal. The cow moved off again, dragging the priest behind, his wet cassock floating just below the surface.
‘Bastard!’ Picallon yelled, standing up in his dugout and shaking his fist at Tuberge.
‘You shit, it’ll be your turn next!’ Palfy shouted in the sergeant’s direction.
Tuberge prudently kept his head down, but shouted back, ‘The next one to complain gets a bullet in the back of the neck from me.’
‘Do we shoot him?’ Jean asked in a low voice.
‘He won’t show himself,’ Palfy answered. ‘He may even be making his way to the rear at this very moment.’
Five hundred metres away on the far bank, from behind a half-ruined wall, a machine gun fired several rounds and jammed. Silence fell again between the lines, as if death were taking a last deep breath before exhaling its fire across the meadow and through the willows. Everything looked frozen: the cumulus clouds in the pale sky, the canal’s greenish-black water, the leaves in the trees and the tall grass stained with the red spots of poppies that had been winking there since sunrise. The stillness might have carried on for an eternity if a crow had not suddenly swooped low over the canal, attracted by the corpses that floated there. Someone muttered that it must be the priest’s soul, as the crow settled on a willow branch, but the priest’s soul must have been as cursed as his body. The first mortar struck the willow, splitting it in two, and the blast scattered black crow feathers in every direction. Shells began falling far beyond the canal, behind Jean and Palfy, shredding trees and blasting funnel-shaped craters out of the meadow. Then a salvo hit the canal, sending up geysers of brackish water. Progressively the range was adjusted until at last it started pounding the bank held by the French in their foxholes. For an hour, shells arced through the sky, emitting soft whistles as they fell. They could be seen climbing merrily, twisting as they rose, then gliding and hesitating, as if choosing their targets, and boring their way down through the air to land in a spray of earth, grass and stones, their dull thud as they burst putting an end to fear.
For no discernible reason, the mortars fell silent. The Germans failed to show themselves. Trees and bushes were ablaze. At eight in the morning the sun was already sweltering. Packed into their foxholes, their necks protected by their packs, Tuberge’s group was sweating as much from fear as heat. The corpses of the cow and the priest had disappeared. In their wake drifted dead branches, a boater, and a cutter with a smashed gunwale. Palfy raised his helmet on the tip of a bayonet, but no one shot at it and he crawled gingerly out of the foxhole. On the far side of the canal, in the deserted meadow, the wind was bending the tall grass.
‘Tuberge,’ he called.
Nothing.
‘Maybe he’s been blown to bits,’ someone said with unconcealed joy.
‘I’d hate to miss that,’ Picallon said, crawling towards the sergeant’s shelter.
There was no one in the shelter but it was piled high with tinned food, wine and ammunition. On a plank Tuberge had pinned a photo of a donkey with an erection sodomising an enormous Hindu woman.
‘They’ve cleared off!’ Picallon shouted.
‘Try and get hold of the command post.’
The seminarian disappeared down the trench. He returned two minutes later.
‘Scarpered! With the 75.’
The 75’s disappearance was no news to anyone. Ever since war had been declared the self-propelled field gun, commanded by a reservist officer cadet, seemed to have had as its principal objective staying out of sight of the enemy. With three shells it could have silenced their mortars, but that would have meant risking an artillery piece destined to feature in a museum with a caption that read: ‘75mm cannon, having succeeded throughout the war of 1939–40 in not aggravating relations – already very bad at that time – between Albert Lebrun’s France and Adolf Hitler’s Germany’.
‘We’re buggered!’ Noël, a railway worker who was always depressed, said. ‘`We’ll have to surrender. Who’s got something white we can wave?’
‘Not on your life,’ said Pastoureau. ‘The Krauts don’t take prisoners. If I have to die either way, I’m for scarpering too. But who’s going to take command?’
‘You, Palfy, you’re the oldest!’ Joël Tambourin, a Breton, declared.
‘All right,’ Palfy said, having expected the nomination. ‘Jean will be my NCO.’
‘What’s happening?’ Picallon called from his hole. ‘What are we doing?’
‘Palfy’s taken over command!’ Tambourin yelled back with the joy of a man who had been liberated. ‘We’ve got a chief!’
Palfy smiled and murmured, ‘The frogs need their prince.’
Jean crawled across open ground to the next foxhole. For some incomprehensible reason, the Germans were holding their fire. The other group was dug in about twenty metres away. Jean hailed them. Getting no answer and tired of crawling, he got to his feet, ran and jumped into the hole: into a tangle of pulverised heads and crushed faces, of men whose spilt guts were already attracting flies. Two, possibly three mortars had fallen directly into the shelter and Jean found himself floundering in a pulp of blood, shredded flesh, and pieces of bone. His right boot finished the job of crushing a man’s chest. As he pulled it free, he pulled white ribs away with it and squashed the heart, from which thick black blood trickled. A ghastly nausea gripped him, and his whole body seemed to turn over in an excruciating pain that affected his arms and legs, as if his own life was being dragged out of him by giant pincers. He vomited not just the hunk of bread and corned beef he had eaten during the night, but all the food he had ever eaten, all his innards, his blood, his saliva, his snot. Intolerable throbbing drilled into his temples as he shut his eyes and clawed at the parapet to try to get out of the hole and flee the horror. Standing up, casting all caution to the winds, he wanted to run but collapsed, his foot caught in a length of someone’s guts. A machine-gun volley rattled over his head and his mouth was filled with earth.
‘Crawl, you bloody idiot!’ Palfy shouted.
Jean disentangled his foot and, green and trembling, let himself drop into the foxhole, where Palfy broke his fall.
‘Well …? Oh, I see. Right.’
Palfy in turn crept to the nearest position in the opposite direction, which was better protected by a parapet, but there the men had decamped, abandoning kit and ammunition. Another machine-gun volley punctuated his return.
‘Nothing for it but to do the same.’
‘Forget it. I’m not moving,’ Boucharon said. ‘All things considered, I’m all right here. Demob!’
‘I’m going,’ Palfy said. ‘If I make it to Picallon I’ll cover you.’
He climbed out. The enemy machine gun fired, kicking up dry sprays of earth around him, but he reached Picallon and set up the light machine gun.
‘Doesn’t fill me with joy,’ Noël said.
‘You’d have to be mad!’ Boucharon added.
‘Would it fill you with joy if I get across?’ Jean asked.
‘Ma
ybe.’
Jean got across. A bullet ricocheted and hit his heel, another holed his jacket.
‘Three of us! The holy trinity!’ Picallon said, laughing uproariously and helping Jean back to an upright position.
‘Your turn, Noël,’ Palfy called.
The machine gun scythed through Noël’s spine when he was halfway across. He did not even flinch, just fell with his face flat on the ground. His fingers untensed and slid away from his rifle. Tambourin, whose turn it was next, hesitated at the shelter’s edge, then scrambled forward, crawling level with the immobile body. Palfy’s light machine gun discharged a magazine over his head towards the invisible German machine gun, which responded with a volley of bullets that riddled the earthwork of Tuberge’s shelter just as Tambourin was sliding into it. Palfy caught a dead man in his arms. He placed him in the bottom of the foxhole and sat him up. His face was already waxen, his lips pulled back to reveal his gums.
‘Palfy?’ Boucharon called from the shelter.
‘Yes.’
‘What happened to Tambourin?’
‘You want to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘Dead.’
‘In that case, all things considered, I’m staying put. They’re not cannibals, the Germans, after all. Demob!’
‘Please yourself!’
And so Boucharon, who had been expecting to throw away his uniform that day, kept it for another five years. On the other hand, he travelled and got to know the camps of Poland, Silesia and Württemberg where, working as a farmhand, he impregnated the wife of a farmer who was freezing at Stalingrad. Not the worst life he might have had, as he admitted, free of worries, his board guaranteed, and plenty of available women. He talked about it for the rest of his life after he got back to his family in Creuse, over whom the war had passed without a trace. From time to time, he still roared, ‘Demob!’ when he had drunk a bit too much at the Café des Amateurs, but no one knew what demobilisation he was talking about, and nor did he. For a few years after he got back he dreamt of his German companion, of her delicious breasts and her strong smell of milk after she had been milking, but the memory gradually faded and he arrived by degrees at a princely state of apathy for everything that did not belong to his little world of food, wine and work on the farm, where he lived alone with his dogs, cows and two pigs. In which case let us speak of him no longer (in any case his role in this story is about as episodic as it could be) and return to Palfy, Jean and Picallon who, having bid Boucharon, huddled in his hole, farewell, reached a long hedge and then a clearing that they crossed on their stomachs, and finally a sheep pen next to a duck pond. This had been the command post. A table set up outside the door was still strewn with tins of corned beef and sardines, red wine and country bread, and cigars.
‘I’m hungry,’ Picallon said. ‘I could eat a horse.’
‘Eat, young priest, eat. I shall keep you company. What about you, Jean?’
‘No thanks.’
He would never again be able to swallow another mouthful. The smell of blood and human flesh clung to him, and he gagged again, all the more painfully because his stomach was empty. He leant against a tree and stayed there for a long time, staring at a landscape as blurred as the sea bed. Picallon gobbled down three tins of corned beef, a litre of wine, and an entire loaf of bread. The enemy machine gun, still close by, was regularly audible, firing at random in the direction of the canal bank where Boucharon had decided to see how events turned out. Turning away so as not to see the other two gorging themselves, Jean walked into the house. A headquarters map was spread out on the kitchen table, dotted with white and red flags as if for a lesson at the École de Guerre. In their scramble to retreat the staff had left behind the stock of flags, a pair of binoculars, a swagger stick, even a monocle attached to its black string. Jean looked for their canal position on the map and understood why the Germans had not attacked. They had settled for a flanking movement via a bridge ten kilometres downstream. Alerted, the command post had ordered a withdrawal so hasty that only the NCOs had known about it. But the map indicated the local paths as well, and the enemy could not be in possession of all of them. If they moved at night or kept to the woods, they would eventually rejoin the French lines. As propositions went, it was optimistic but not so absurd as to be impossible. Nor would it be the first optimistic proposition formulated by members of the French army since 10 May 1940.
Lacking communications and at the mercy of idiotic wireless broadcasts and a hopeless romanticism, France, its retreating army and its refugees lived in a whirlwind of rumours and lies that, despite the majority being instantly refutable, ricocheted from village to village and unit to unit. The strategic discussions at a thousand Cafés du Commerce had never been blessed by such a unanimous belief in success before, and as the retreat gathered momentum a veritable torrent of misinformation received the same serious consideration: the very night of the German forces’ entry into Paris, Hitler had gone to the Opéra to hear Siegfried and gliders had dropped a battalion of parachutists disguised as nuns on the outskirts of Tours, where they had taken control of the aerodrome without firing a shot; other parachutists disguised as farm workers were giving false directions to the French armoured division and sending it straight into the lion’s den; Roosevelt was about to make available to France and Great Britain five hundred fighters and more than a thousand bombers, with aircrew; a famous singer had been shot: her coded songs broadcast on the wireless had given away troop numbers at the Maginot line; two trains filled with gold ingots were going to buy Mussolini’s neutrality; the German armoured division had only a day’s fuel left and the bombing of the Ruhr was causing strikes in the armament factories; some units were already running out of ammunition; in any case, the president of the Council had announced with a tremor in his voice that ‘Germany’s iron supply line has been cut’ and it had not a gram of steel left.
Jean went outside again, map in hand. Using a spirit stove Picallon was heating up some coffee he had found in a flask, and Palfy was coming back, smiling broadly at his discovery: a hundred metres away, in the shelter of birch woods, were two working tankettes with trailers stuffed with mines, sub-machine guns and ammunition. The tankettes, with which the French army had been supplied in abundance for want of battle tanks, had been assembled at high speed at arsenals to the south of the Loire and lined up under the proud gaze of sergeant-majors to be counted and re-counted. They had proved utterly useless. They looked like cartoon tanks, the kind of thing rich men’s children might play with on the family estate. What terrifying toys they could have been in childish, cruel hands, flattening hens under their tracks, crippling the children of the poor!
With the turret raised, there was room for two inside each one. Picallon could not drive and in any case his height – close to six foot three – made him too big to fit into a tankette. He settled himself on the bonnet of Jean’s instead, accepting, as a consolation, a new sub-machine gun still covered with the oil applied by the regimental armourer, who must have relinquished it only under the most extreme duress.
The convoy jerked into motion, heading south on a forest track through the woods. The tankettes advanced slowly, doing ten kilometres an hour at best. Sheltered by summer foliage and twice cutting across roads that helped serve as landmarks, they reached the edge of the forest where they were forced to move without cover through a hot, empty landscape in which the hay roasted by the June sun was starting to wilt. Three Stukas passed overhead, way up, at well over a thousand metres, mission accomplished, dazzling birds in the midday sun. The road led through a deserted hamlet, then a second where, suddenly, a scarcely human form emerged from a doorway, a ball of sound slumped in a wheelchair. The man was working the wheelchair’s wheels desperately, trying to get away from a pack of excited dogs. Picallon slid off the bonnet and walked towards the invalid. He had been abandoned there with a plate of rice and bread and water that he was protecting, groaning inarticulately, from the starving dogs. At twenty
paces he reeked of excrement and urine. Picallon stepped back.
‘What do I do?’ he asked.
‘Kill the dogs before they make a meal of him!’ Palfy ordered.
The sub-machine gun silenced the wheelchair’s famished attackers, and Picallon nudged the corpses into a ditch with his boot. The man shrieked with joy and clapped.
‘That’s enough, young priest, you can’t do any more!’
‘It’s disgusting.’
‘No going soft. Come on.’
They set off again, and the man in the wheelchair tried for a moment to follow them, burping and coughing in the cloud of dust and exhaust gases. Re-seated on the tankette’s bonnet, Picallon began to heat up as if he was being grilled and started to pray aloud to St Lawrence, offering his apologies for not hitherto having appreciated his martyrdom. Jean, having familiarised himself with the tankette’s various directional levers, was following the tracks made by Palfy, who had dived into a series of dusty paths bordered by yellowed, overripe wheat and parched grass. The harvest of 1940 was superb, but there were no men to take it in. From time to time across the fields they saw the distant figures of women in white headscarves, cutting wheat by hand and forking the crop into carts drawn by Percherons whose coats trickled with sweat. But no one turned to watch the two strange vehicles lurching noisily into and out of view in plumes of dust. Jean felt an intoxicating sense of freedom. No more yapping NCOs to order pathetically inadequate defensive fire or a premature withdrawal. He and crazy Palfy were going on holiday, to tour France’s agricultural heartland and discover its bistros where the patronne, in vowels as round as her hips, served ‘her’ pâté de campagne, ‘her’ beef stew, ‘her’ local wine and the pears from ‘her’ garden. But the farms looked like the Mary Celeste, the famous brigantine discovered still under sail in the middle of the ocean, without a crew, with breakfast served on the table, the fire still lit in the galley and not a soul on board. They stopped at some of these farms and called out, and no one came. There might be a dog barking, pigs snuffling in the rubbish, cows with swollen udders mooing in the pastures, but apart from the few women they glimpsed, busy bringing in the wheat, France had been emptied of its population by the wave of a magic wand, with the single exception of a disabled man in a wheelchair whom the pigs would eventually deal with too, for lack of anything better to eat.