The Foundling's War

by Michel Déon

  ‘I can’t show you any more,’ Jean said regretfully to Madame, reclaiming his property as Palfy returned, looking yellow and sheepish.

  ‘You had it?’

  ‘You gave it to me this morning, remember. For safekeeping,’ Jean lied, to save face for his friend.

  Madame Michette had seen the list for long enough to scan the names.

  ‘I know some of these people,’ she said meaningfully. ‘They’re acquaintances.’

  ‘Yes,’ Palfy said, ‘but we must ask you to be very discreet. Since you’re clearly a trustworthy person, we can tell you that great plans are being made. The Germans have not won the war, as some benighted souls imagine. They have lost it. It is for that defeat that my friend and I are working. We are, I’ll be completely frank and open with you, secret agents.’

  ‘My lips are sealed!’ Madame Michette breathed, closing her eyes and pressing her hand to her stomach, which was making a joyful gurgling sound.

  Jean tried very hard not to laugh. Madame Michette led them to a small ground-floor office from where, through a spyhole, they could monitor her customers arriving and leaving. As soon as they were settled, they fell fast asleep in their armchairs, full of lunch and exhausted from their recent forced march, and were undisturbed by the noise of the knocker and the comings and goings in the hall. Her uniformed customers, that day at least, refrained from behaving like conquering heroes. They came, mostly in groups of three or four and pushing a blushing virgin ahead of them, and the authority of Madame and her assistant madam impressed them deeply. There were no brawls, nor Bacchic outbursts.

  Let us make the most of the moment while our two heroes slumber to satisfy the reader’s curiosity about a point of history that the author has, in his Machiavellian way, so far left blank. What happened when the twelve rifles of the SS Grenadiers took aim in the little village square where Constantin Palfy, Jean Arnaud, Francis Picallon and the surveyor Jacques Graindorge had been lined up to be shot? Of course, apart from themselves and Obersturmführer Karl Schmidt, no one really thought they would be shot. We would not have undertaken the narrative of Jean Arnaud’s long sentimental education if we had had to call a halt at the age of twenty because a uniformed idiot who played the violin had ordered a platoon of his men to execute four Frenchmen after a good lunch. No. Jean Arnaud and the strange Constantin Palfy will have a hard life, but it is Karl Schmidt who will be the first to die, which no one, except for his wife and children, will greatly mind. But let us abandon Karl Schmidt, whose only virtue was to add a grotesque element to a macabre spectacle. The thing we need to know is that the SS Grenadiers did take aim at our friends. It was a ghastly, melancholy minute and few who have survived such a thing can bring themselves to talk about it. Twelve black holes and an NCO, his boots squarely planted where he stands, revolver in hand for the coup de grâce, are an image you don’t forget. If you escape, by a miracle, that image awakens a deeper respect for life, and the three-line notices announcing the death of a hostage jump out of the news with a significance so harrowing that it can become unbearable. What does one think about at such a moment? It is as difficult for the survivor to remember as it is for anyone else to imagine. If we were to ask Jean Arnaud, he would answer, ‘I don’t know. Nothing, maybe. Two or three fleeting memories: Maman in the kitchen of her house, holding the iron up to her cheek, Papa limping across the garden, Antoinette showing me her bottom at the foot of the cliffs, Chantal in our bedroom in Rue Lepic, or Geneviève, my real mother, embarking at Cannes to escape from the war. But all of it very fast, very superficial. Nothing, in fact. And not even a thought for my soul’s salvation. No, really, nothing dignified or interesting, not the sort of thing you read in classical tragedies, romantic plays, or heroic novels.’ Come to the point, I hear you say. But the author cannot help but go on hesitating to say what saved Jean and Palfy that day, so utterly improbable does it seem here. It would be so much easier to explain that it was all a poor and violent joke on the Obersturmführer’s part to test the four Frenchmen’s equanimity, or, more prosaically, to divert himself after a campaign so rapid that the SS units intended for the fiercest fighting had not had to fire a shot in anger. Valiant warriors who had advanced with the thought of heroic battles to come had experienced considerable frustration. They had been drilled for war, not sightseeing. The firing squad was thus not merely a macabre joke. A few seconds longer, and Jean and Palfy would have been shot. So we are left with no alternative but to invoke Providence, that benevolent entity that sometimes stoops to take a hand in human destinies and delay deaths without giving reasons, just to amuse itself, or so it seems, to toy with existences that are no more or less dear to it than others and that it only identifies by caprice or a taste for sarcasm.

  On this occasion, then, Providence appeared in the guise of an open-topped car belonging to the German army, an elegant high-bodied vehicle driven by a helmeted chauffeur whose chinstrap was immaculately placed. On the rear seat sat three individuals: two French soldiers in forage caps, flanking a Wehrmacht colonel. They had come from the south and been on their way for more than an hour, which showed how far behind the lines the tankettes were. But was there still a line on 20 June 1940? One wonders. The car was crossing the square when the colonel caught sight of the drama in which the Obersturmführer was already losing interest. He tapped the driver’s shoulder. The car braked in a cloud of dust. The Unterscharführer ordered his platoon to about-turn and present arms. Karl Schmidt attempted to inject an offhand note into his salute, but the colonel ordered him to approach.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing? Are you shooting civilians?’

  ‘They’re irregulars, Herr Oberst.’

  ‘They are not, because there aren’t any. And if there were, they would first of all be answerable to a court martial, not to an SS lieutenant.’

  ‘Herr Oberst, I assure you that they are dangerous bandits.’

  The colonel sighed and stepped from his car to approach the men lined up in front of the Café des Amis.

  ‘Will you excuse me,’ he said in French to the two prisoners who flanked him, pale and with clenched teeth, on the rear seat.

  The colonel approached Jacques Graindorge, who was seized again by a mad hope.

  ‘Were you sheltering these soldiers?’ he asked scornfully. ‘If one may call them soldiers …’

  ‘I thought they were Germans, General! I’m a friend of Germany, General, of Greater Germany, General.’

  ‘A friend of Germany ought to be able to tell the difference between a colonel and a general and a pair of khaki trousers and a pair of field-grey trousers. Or alternatively he’s an idiot, but even if he is we aren’t going to shoot every idiot on earth – we’d be here for years.’

  One of the prisoners got out of the car and walked up to the colonel. Had it not been for his uniform, he could have been taken for a German: a tall Celt with curly blond hair, eyes of a clear blue, hollow cheeks.

  ‘Colonel, will you allow me to ask these men a question?’

  ‘Of course, my dear fellow.’

  The man stared at the prisoners in turn, with great concentration.

  ‘Are there any Bretons among you?’

  ‘I am Anglo-Serb,’ Palfy said.

  ‘I’m Norman,’ Jean said.

  ‘From the Jura!’ Picallon sang out.

  ‘And you, Monsieur?’ The prisoner turned to Graindorge.

  ‘From the Auvergne!’

  The man turned back to the colonel and shrugged.

  ‘They are of no interest to me at all. Having said that, Colonel, spare them if you’re able and if you believe, as I do, that we should begin our project in a spirit of reconciliation rather than hatred.’

  ‘Consider it done!’ the colonel said.

  He called Karl Schmidt and ordered him to release the prisoners. The Obersturmführer protested. The officer reminded him of his rank. There was much heel clicking and more presenting of arms and the SS section drove away in its armoured car
s.

  ‘Do we have you to thank?’ Palfy asked the Frenchman.

  ‘No. Thank the colonel.’

  ‘There are always blunders when two great peoples such as Germany and France are reconciled,’ the German said, ‘but it is well known in Berlin that your country has been plunged into a fratricidal war by unscrupulous politicians … Now, leave your two tankettes and try to rejoin your army …’

  Laughing, he added, ‘… if you have strong legs.’

  Jean studied the French prisoner who had spoken to the colonel with such assurance, and to whom the colonel spoke in a tone close to deference. In the colonel’s car, the other prisoner was looking both furious and bored. It was the combination of the two faces that reminded Jean where he had seen them before, one open and friendly, the other sarcastic and closed.

  ‘I’m wondering whether I might possibly know you,’ Jean said to the prisoner whose incomprehensible contribution to the situation had saved their lives. ‘You wouldn’t be a friend of the abbé Le Couec?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you know me too, and your friend sitting in the car owes his freedom to me. My name is Jean Arnaud and I led him by bicycle from Tôtes to Grangeville eight years ago. I was a little boy then.’

  ‘Jean! Jean from Grangeville!’

  He kissed him. The colonel smiled. Things had been going very well ever since the morning. When he had asked a group of prisoners of war for any Bretons among them to make themselves known to him, he had had the surprise of coming across two senior members of the Breton National Party. The reader who still has a vague memory of Jean’s childhood will already have guessed that these two are Yann and Monsieur Carnac, names that in the underground denote the two separatists who, having taken part in the attack at Rennes on 6 August 1932, on the eve of a visit by Édouard Herriot, had fled and met up again at the abbé Le Couec’s rectory at Grangeville. A terrific coincidence, I will agree, having promised that these kinds of magic meetings would be putting in no further appearances, yet it must be admitted that in the general chaos of that time anything was possible. Monsieur Carnac stepped from the car and shook Jean’s hand.

  ‘I wouldn’t have recognised you. You’re a man now.’

  The colonel (I have not given his name as we shall not be seeing him again in Jean Arnaud’s life; he is no petty Prussian squire with a monocle screwed into his eye – there really would have needed to be a fantastic reservoir of petty squires to supply the entire German army with officers – but a professor of Celtic studies at the University of Mainz whose detailed report on Breton separatism, published at the outbreak of war, had attracted the attention of the German high command), the colonel seemed over the moon. His grand political design was taking shape: the two prisoners he was taking to Dortmund, where separatists of every stripe, Breton, Basque, Corsican and Alsatian, were being assembled, had sympathisers in the rest of the country. They were not disliked, far from it. France was behind them!

  We shall cut short the scene that followed. The colonel was in a hurry to return to Germany. He signed three safe-conduct passes for Palfy, Jean and Picallon and assured Graindorge of his protection.

  ‘If I may give you a word of advice,’ he said to the three soldiers, ‘it would be to throw away those uniforms and lose yourselves on one of the farms around here. Marshal Pétain requested an armistice last night. The war is over …’

  The village square returned to a state of calm, and if the two tankettes had not still been parked in the shade it would have been easy to imagine that it was any summer’s day at siesta time. Graindorge, his fear evaporated, and overcome by shame and rage, hastened to his house and locked himself in. The three friends walked across to a clothes shop which they opened with a boot through the window. Inside, they found that all that was left were trousers and jackets that were either too large or too small. They spent the next two weeks on a farm bringing in the hay, heard that the armistice had been signed and the ceasefire had come into effect. Picallon, ever dutiful, left on his own to rejoin the regiment, said to be stationed at Clermont-Ferrand. Palfy and Jean took longer to get themselves organised. They had become fond of the farm, where they were looked after lavishly in the evenings when they came in from the fields. But once the hay was in, there was no longer any need for their services, and they set out. It was on the morning of their arrival at Clermont that we first caught sight of them on a café terrace, enjoying their regiment marching past and moved by a glimpse of a pretty young woman with ash-blond hair, wearing a dress of translucent lawn.

  Their siesta, deepened by Madame Michette’s red wine and Bénédictine, was succeeded by a conversation which we can summarise briefly. Palfy felt quite at home at the Sirène – he would happily have spent several days there – and urged Jean to hand over the secret letter to the patronne, a woman of intelligence, well organised and enterprising. She was capable of getting them out of trouble at a time when contacts, ideas and courage would not bear fruit so easily. What could Clermont-Ferrand offer them by way of resources in these difficult days? With the frontiers closed, there was no leaving France now, and even more inconveniently, to get across the demarcation line from the northern zone to the southern was impossible without a special pass. Despair would obviously have been absurd. The cage in which they found themselves was still a large one, and the freedom of movement it offered was not so very different from before the war. The newsstands were still covered with names of newspapers that reminded them of Paris: Le Figaro, Le Journal, Paris-Soir, Le Temps, Action Française, now proudly launching into the subject of the ‘national revolution’. In short, one had to be there in order to see what would happen. Jean, however, wanted to keep the prince and Salah’s letter, which was intended to be used only in extreme necessity. What, in any case, could it contain? Probably a recommendation to some powerful person who controlled the destinies of thirty such welcoming establishments scattered here and there around France. As such, that person was likely to have close relations with police and politicians, and Jean, more by instinct than serious consideration, recoiled from using such a recommendation, to the point where he was willing to leave Clermont if he could not find work there …

  ‘We’ve got nothing to eat this evening!’ Palfy objected.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Very well … let’s wait till tomorrow.’

  This was stating the obvious. The truth was that Palfy was becoming bourgeois. He was less fond of the risks that for so long had been a prime feature of his character. Jean, on the other hand, felt that the situation was tailor-made for them: a few francs in their pockets and nowhere to stay.

  ‘I know,’ Jean said, ‘let’s play a little game while we’re at it. To unearth, in this town where we know neither streets nor habits, a pearl beyond price lost in the crowd …’

  ‘Yes, she’s very pretty. But you’re not going to make me wear out my shoe leather. In all sincerity I prefer Zizi. Firstly because she’s a good cook—’

  ‘Palfy, you think of nothing but eating these days.’

  ‘Yes, and it’s my impression that that is going to become more and more difficult. We’re not even allowed to go to Switzerland, where they’ve hollowed out mountains to fill them with chocolate and butter. So we might as well get a head start here. The establishment is very welcoming—’

  ‘Nothing says that old woman Michette is going to be happy keeping you for a single night.’

  ‘You’re out of your mind! She’s quivering with anticipation at the idea of harbouring secret agents.’

  Palfy was right. Madame Michette offered them a room without any prompting.

  ‘After midnight we’re closed. Nénette and Zizi will sleep together. You can use Zizi’s room. We’ll give you clean sheets. Tomorrow perhaps we’ll have some news of Monsieur Michette. An officer told me that his regiment has reached Perpignan at last, after defending heroically. He’ll be here soon; he knows his duty now that the war is over.’

  Palfy explai
ned that they had another problem: to find their contact, a pretty young woman who answered to the name of Claude, green eyes, ash-blond hair, a blue lawn dress (but well dressed enough not to wear it two days running), whom they had just missed this morning because of the crowds gathering for the parade.

  ‘Naturally,’ he pointed out, lowering his voice, ‘we are still talking about a secret mission, and as I’m sure you’re aware, when a meeting between agents fails, they stand a strong chance of not making contact a second time. Safeguarding security is of the utmost importance in our work.’

  Madame Michette threw herself into her two guests’ predicament with an eagerness that astonished them. The truth was that she had recently become a devoted fan of a serial in L’Avenir, the Clermont-Ferrand newspaper, about the adventures of a secret agent whose name, Soleil, had particularly captivated her. Ever since her breathless daily dose of Soleil’s adventures, which had had her hurrying to the newsstand before she drank her morning coffee, she had dreamt of offering her services to her country. She had begun raiding the bookshops for spy novels. Accepting that her appearance was unlikely to allow her to seduce an enemy agent and extract his secret from him, she had been waiting for an opportunity that would reveal her deeper qualities of courage, intuition and decisiveness. In this bourgeois woman brought up to respect the virtues on which an honest and hard-working society was based, there seethed ambitions that her position as madam of a brothel did not allow her to satisfy. She suffered from not being ‘accepted’ in society. The great and the good of Clermont were as friendly to her as good taste allowed, but in public either barely greeted her or failed to acknowledge her entirely if they were with their wives. Their disregard made her miserable and she had complained bitterly about it to Monsieur Michette, who himself had no such sensibilities and contented himself with scrupulously keeping the establishment’s accounts for the benefit of its powerful patrons. Palfy and Jean could not have guessed upon what marvellously fertile soil they had fallen, or what an ally they were making for themselves by asking this honest woman for her help. In a flash Madame Michette had glimpsed an incredible opportunity in the challenge they had set her. If she came out of it well she would be eligible for other missions, and one day, like her husband, be entitled to wear the Croix de Guerre, and earn the respect of all.