But most families, at every social level, did not want their boys to go. It was resented that the Government, who arbitrarily removed a much-needed worker from the family farm or business, paid no compensation. The standard length of service was five years for much of the time, seven between 1855 and 1868. The families feared, with good reason, that after being so long away, learning to play cards and drink wine and quarrel and go with strange women in cold, dirty towns, their sons would be lost to them for ever. Indeed, that was part of the Government’s intention – to acquire an experienced force of men habituated to army life and untrained at anything else so that they would re-enlist as volunteers. Middle-class families and prosperous peasant ones began to take out private insurance against conscription, as against fire, flood or hail (the Mutuelle de l’Indre company organized one such scheme in 1863). Other fathers went deep into debt to buy a boy out; some close-knit Communes organized whip-rounds to help deserving cases.
And yet, for all it was dreaded, the tirage (the draw) was a time of celebration and masculine bonding. In the Berry, those whose numbers came up would march in formation to the local market town dressed in clean white smocks with ribbons in their hats, a home-made banner carried aloft. At the end of the day, the ones who had been passed fit for service were fêted in the local inns and joked loudly that they had been passed ‘fit for marriage – fit for the girls’, while those who were ‘too small’ or who had ‘bad chests’ or some other infirmity made themselves scarce, feeling humiliated. The classic song of the recruit on his way, ‘Je n’en regrett’ que ma Rosalie’, tells a different story from that of traditional peasant attachment to the family soil. When Rosalie suggests to her sweet-heart that her own father might help pay for a substitute, she is told by the departing boy: ‘They won’t find another fellow as big and strong to take my place.’ Some twenty-year-olds, sick of a life where they never encountered a face that was not known to them, or that, more significantly, did not know them, must have been eager for a world elsewhere.
I felt that Auguste Chaumette might well have belonged in this category. It took some perseverance to establish the facts of his military career. Having traced the French military archives to the redoubt of Vincennes, I had difficulty in supplying the precise indications to have his record looked up: his writing was so bad that neither I nor several French citizens whom I consulted could decide at first to which company of dragoons he was attached, and there were twenty-six companies. It was suggested at Vincennes that I look up the local recruitment lists in the Châteauroux Archives for the year 1868, when Auguste reached the key age of twenty, to discover whether he had drawn a low number then and, if not, that I search the lists for 1870 when the war began and he was likely to have come under the general call-up. However, this apparently simple course of action proved not to be so: the rule, I was told by the staff in charge of the Salle des Archives, was that all military records were classified as secret for a hundred and fifty years after the birth of the soldiers concerned. Auguste had been born five years too late: to see if his name figured on a public list I should have to wait till 1998.
Since, in the same Archive, I had been free to consult census returns a mere thirty years old (in England and Scotland they have to be a hundred years old) the military authorities’ concern for the privacy of long-dead individuals seemed to me excessive. The most sympathetic lady clearly thought so too, but endeavoured to make it seem reasonable.
‘It’s because matters to do with health sometimes appear on the military lists, you see.’
‘You mean, someone might object to my finding out that their great-great-great-grandfather had flat feet?’
‘Well, or tuberculosis. People might not want it known they had had that in the family…’
‘After five generations?’
‘I know. But you know how people are about their own family…’
I laid further siege to Vincennes who, fortunately for me, seemed to interpret the rules rather differently. Eventually a decision was taken on the regiment number and I got an answer. It turned out that in looking for a conscript and a possible death in battle I had not been quite on course. Chaumette, Auguste, it appeared, had escaped the draft in 1868. But in 1870, when the Germans invaded France, he joined up of his own accord.
The events in the north-east took their time to penetrate the Écho de l’Indre, but by 19 August they had ousted from the front page the pressing local issue of the summer drought. Stories about ‘Prussian atrocities’ appeared, a foretaste of the propaganda machine of the future, greater wars. The previous summer, and the one before, the big story had been the local celebration of the Emperor’s birthday, a display of servile adoration and piety complete with fireworks, and special prizes to children who were dutiful to their parents (‘They have the right to decide your Destiny’). This year, however, the birthday went unnoticed – in fact the Emperor was soon to be deposed.
The paper carried rumours of local lads being among the casualties: firm news was still slow to arrive then; army practices were in this and most other ways unchanged since the times of the earlier Napoleon. Young men previously excused from service, married men and those on the reserve list were warned that they might be ‘called to the colours’. Substitution had at last been abolished under pressure of circumstances, and all were told to present themselves in La Châtre at seven one September morning along with the ‘class of ’70’, the current twenty-year-olds. Those deemed not too short, tubercular or otherwise unfit were formed into rough ranks. They marched in a cheerful, undisciplined way to the sound of bagpipes the twenty-three miles to Châteauroux, where the realities of military life took over. George Sand, old now, saw them pass the gates of her manor as she had seen the troops of Napoleon’s levées pass in her childhood.
However, by then many men had already enlisted voluntarily, swept along on a wave of new patriotism or perhaps reflecting that if they jumped before they were pushed they might do better for themselves. Auguste Chaumette had volunteered on 15 August, a traditional religious holiday and the day that the state of war became official. Five days later he was ‘in Africa’.
This at first sight seemed so implausible that I wondered if the brief record I had been sent had been miscopied. Why, in the very fortnight when soldiers were being rushed from the colonial garrisons to la métropole to take part in what turned out to be the rout at Sedan, had this recruit been sent in the opposite direction? Expert advice, however, suggested to me that this was in fact a classic example of the ponderous workings of the French army at that date. (The Prussian one was far more efficient.) Auguste had apparently elected to join the Zouaves, an infantry regiment who did fight in France but whose headquarters were, as their name suggests, in north Africa. At that date this meant Algeria, since French hegemony over Tunisia and Morocco came later. So, willy-nilly, to Algiers or Mers el Kebir, any new Zouave was sent for basic training, regardless of other factors.
The Zouaves, who wore an ornate, Arab-inspired uniform, were a largely colonial company; just why Auguste joined them must also have a logical explanation, or at least a consistent one. It would have been an improbable destination for a young man enlisting in central France, but the very fact that he was in Africa already by 20 August shows, given the communications of the period, that he cannot have been coming from his own pays: the various stages of the journey would have taken far longer than five days. He must have enlisted much further south, most likely in some seaport such as Toulon or Marseilles. The Zouave regiments were regularly stationed there, and would have been a natural choice for someone who was in the area already.
Things begin to fall into place: his army service does not account for his being absent from home already by 1866, when his recently widowed mother might have been expected to need his help to run the inn. Indeed, being the son of a widow was often a good reason for getting excused from service altogether. So it seems that before he had even turned eighteen Auguste was elsewhere, and it would now a
ppear that ‘elsewhere’ was the Mediterranean coast, a far more exciting place for a restless youngster than central France.
On 9 September 1870 he moved again, but simply to another Algerian depot: he was transferred to the Chasseurs d’Afrique, a cavalry regiment. Presumably this more glamorous option was his own choice and he was familiar with horses: as an innkeeper’s son, attending to the mounts of passing trade would have been one of his earliest duties. Perhaps, however, he was unconvincing as a rider, for he was returned to the Zouaves in January. At that time, far away in France, Paris was undergoing its winter of siege and the Prussian capture of Alsace-Lorraine was being bitterly contested. Auguste missed all that. He stayed in Africa till late September 1871 when, according to his record, he was renvoyé dans ses foyers – literally, ‘sent back to his home hearths’ or back to his people.
Maybe he did go home briefly, but we know that he did not stay. The records seem incomplete here, for he evidently remained in the army: two years later we find him writing to his sister from Meaux, having metamorphosed into a dragoon. He had apparently paid his family a recent, not entirely happy visit: ‘I did the whole journey back here on foot … If you see Mother, will you tell her I am very hurt by her letter, she has misunderstood what I said…’
There are no other notes on his movements. His record ends ‘libérable du service actif le 10 août 1875’ – almost exactly five years from the day when he first joined up.
‘Libérable’ – entitled to be released. He did not necessarily avail himself of this right. ‘The historical archives have no further information on the individual concerned. There is no file, on him, a usual situation in the case of Other Ranks.’
It seems highly probable that he never again returned home.
We know that his sister kept, all her life, the scrawled demand for money signed with a hasty endearment. We know that thirty years later, in the 1900s (the earliest period that anyone now alive in Chassignolles can recall), his very existence had been forgotten. Of course his sister and a few childhood friends could not have forgotten, but no doubt they had long ceased to mention him. It would seem that, regardless of the provisions of French law, he had effectively disinherited himself from any claim on the inn. His mother had been gone since 1884, dead of that cancer of the breast she tried to treat with lumps of raw steak in what is now Jeanne Pagnard’s kitchen.
Maybe, when Auguste did leave the army, he drifted with his ‘small debts’ from Meaux to Paris or to another of the expanding northern cities, where he became caught up in money-making schemes, successful or otherwise. Or maybe he was drawn south again, back to the Mediterranean, and any original intention to contact his family again and repair ‘misunderstandings’ faded and faded until it was extinguished by guilt and time. But I think it most likely that he returned to Africa and settled there, and that this accounts for his total disappearance. ‘Tout ça, c’est la faute de l’Afrique,’ as another old adventurer declares at the end of Pagnol’s L’Eau des Collines.
There were opportunities there for active men without families: even in La Châtre you could discover that, in the 1860s and ’70s. What more natural than that he should simply remain in a place where it was never cold and where even the most humble-born Frenchman could have a servant to wait on him? His obscure life history encapsulates a whole era in France’s development and her participation in the glories and follies of nineteenth-century expansionism. From the Auguste Chaumettes of France derived the bitter Franco-Algerian conflicts of the mid-twentieth century.
* * *
This is not, however, the whole of the story. Célestine, it turns out, had not one vanished brother but two.
In the seventeen years between 1833 and 1850, twelve Chaumettes were born in Chassignolles but nearly all belonged to the branch descended from Célestine’s great-uncle Pierre. Submerged in this tide, whose various combinations of Silvain, François, Louis and Félix recur like some natural cycle, I almost overlooked the fact that one other Chaumette of Célestine and Auguste’s generation was born to Silvain-Germain and Anne Laurent. His name was Ursin and he was their first-born, coming into the world in 1843.
I was for a while inclined to think that this hitherto unsuspected brother so close in age, who seemed to have been lost to village memory as completely as Auguste and who had not even left a trace in a letter, had perhaps died in childhood as did his neighbour, little Jean Aussourd. Otherwise, why had he not taken on the inn, at that time when a son almost automatically followed the father into a business if the family were fortunate enough to have one? French law gave him an automatic share in the place; older Berrichon tradition would have favoured him in any case, as the eldest. So his absence in adulthood was still stranger than Auguste’s.
But there was no sign in the Chassignolles register of an early death, and when I got to the census records I found Ursin in place. He was there in 1856 ‘without profession’ (the sign of a family comfortable enough not to need the earnings of a thirteen-year-old) by which time Anne Laurent’s widowed father from Nohant had also joined the household. By 1861, aged eighteen, he was still at home but had become ‘leur fils taillandier’ – ‘their son, a tool maker’. This was a skilled trade, slightly more prestigious than that of a general smith but learnt in a smithy. Antoine Pirot, whose father was a blacksmith, had followed a similar calling. It was just the kind of occupation to be recommended to a young man who, once married, would also take on the inn: such was the classic pattern then and well into the twentieth century. On the evidence of this, Ursin was all set to succeed his father as a prominent member of village society, and should have gone on appearing in the records throughout the decades.
But he does not. By 1866 he had gone, never to reappear. In fact he was most probably gone well before: the tone of Henry Lorant’s letter to Célestine of 1864 suggests that he (Henry) saw himself installed in the inn. Certainly Ursin does not seem to have been present during the eventful year of 1865. He was not an official witness at his sister’s wedding in January; more significantly, he was not there in August either, when his father died. It was the new son-in-law, Pierre Robin, who was not even living in Chassignolles, who represented the family.
Come to that, Ursin was not there either at his mother’s death, nearly twenty years later. It is this very lack of further evidence, and of any apparent trace in village memory, that tells its own tale. But what tale, exactly?
The most obvious and comprehensive explanation for Ursin’s desertion was the one that I had originally assigned in my mind to Auguste – that he had drawn a ‘bad number’ in the military lottery. This would have removed him for seven years and quite likely for ever. Back again to the Archives in Châteauroux and this time, as the sympathetic lady remarked, I was in luck. This was 1993, and Ursin had been born in 1843, exactly one hundred and fifty years earlier.
A hundred and sixty-seven twenty-year-olds appeared in La Châtre from villages round about on the appointed morning in the spring of 1864, minus a few who had failed to return from jobs elsewhere and would now be sought by the police, or who were away with a good excuse and were represented by their fathers. They drew lots, each man plunging his hand in turn into a basket of numbers. Only those with numbers up to eighty-five were then called for interview and examination by a committee of local mayors.
I did not have to seek long for Ursin: he was number twenty-nine. It was noted that he was born and living in Chassignolles, son of Silvain-Germain, that he was able both to read and write and that he was a tool maker. His height was 1.74 metres – about five foot nine inches, tall for that place and time, even taller than the beau farinier of George Sand’s story. But, unlike Sand’s rustic hero, he was also marked as faible – ‘weak’.
The final decision was taken by an army surgeon; it is scribbled against Ursin’s name in his different, impatient hand: ‘Faible de constitution. Improp.’ ‘Unsuitable.’ The army had turned Ursin Chaumette down, and since a century and a half had gone by I was
allowed to know it.
But did ‘weak constitution’ simply imply that he was a skinny, gangling creature without the apparent strength for route marches? Or did it refer to something more specific, such as recognized poor health – a history of asthma, perhaps, or the dreaded phtisie (consumption). There is also, of course, the possibility that faible de constitution was used as a general euphemism for boys whose weakness appeared to be in the head, but the fact that Ursin was a tool maker and literate would suggest that he was not stupid.
I played for a while with the idea that he might have been just rather odd: the sort of young man who then, today and in any era, causes his family pain by his apparent inability to be or think quite like other people – the sort who may drift away and be lost to view. It was unusual to disappear from home in rural France at that time, but, in spite of the travel permits a working man was supposed to carry, it was not really difficult and probably most disappearances never got signalled to the authorities: the new highways were busy with wanderers. From the mid-nineteenth century a trickle of search notices put out by local Mairies hint impotently at family feuds, mental illness, tragedies that will never now be fully elucidated. ‘Louis Got, aged twenty-one, born at Vatan [in the Berry], left that town several weeks ago to work as a tailor in Paris. He was seen on 6 July in Vierzon … and said that he was going to look for work in Romorantin. At that time he still had with him his trade papers and a silver watch…’ That young man, of similar age and social status to Ursin Chaumette, disappeared without trace in 1866.
There was, of course, the simpler possibility that the weakness discerned in Ursin by the army surgeon was a straightforward one which, before long, killed him off. Or he could have died in some accident – an injury at work that turned septic, a fall from a roof, a bolting horse and cart … But nothing appears in the Chassignolles Death Register for Ursin for the rest of the century.
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