Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  III

  The shipment properly labeled and sent off to Algiers, Lanny wanted to see Timgad. He wouldn’t be able to buy antiquities there, but he mustn’t miss inspecting the site. He succeeded in finding a motorcar that ran on gas from burning charcoal, and was driven through a land which in many ways reminded him of the American Far West—the combination of wild scenery and a fine road. He passed through the town of Tébessa, a name which he was to hear often before that year 1942 had come to an end, but not having the gift of prevision he did not pay any special attention.

  On the slopes of the Aurès Mountains, three thousand feet above the Mediterranean, lies what is left of the outpost town of Thamagudi, built by the Emperor Trajan a hundred years after Christ, and now known as Timgad. The Arabs had conquered and destroyed it, and for more than a thousand years the place had been left to the jackals. Recently the French had restored it as far as possible, clearing away the driven sand and setting up the broken columns. So there are long streets, with paving worn by the feet of the Roman legions; and there are a great gate, a forum, and many arches; everything solid and magnificent, for this had been no haphazard growth, but a planned city, covering a whole mountain slope and occupied by some fifty thousand people.

  Lanny was used to Roman ruins, from his childhood on the Cap d’Antibes, and later in England and Spain, but he had never seen anything like this. He inspected the remains of a noble public library—the Roman equivalent of what the Americans call a “Carnegie” library. It had been built at a cost of four hundred thousand sesterces, bequeathed to his native town by the senator Marcus Julius Quintianus Flavus Rogatianus—a gentleman known to the modern world solely because of the inscription found in these ruins.

  In his youth Lanny’s heart had been touched by a tablet found in Antibes, telling about a “little Septentrion child” who had “danced and pleased in the theater.” Here in the forum of this ancient city of the Emperor Trajan he read an inscription from those same ancient days and in that same spirit: “To hunt, to bathe, to play, to laugh, that is to live.” How he would have enjoyed being able to do those same things!

  IV

  Among Lanny’s purposes in North Africa was to meet the younger Denis de Bruyne. The Army had been in great part demobilized under the terms of the armistice, and both officers and men were required to wear civilian clothing. Lanny might have found his friend by inquiring among military people, but he could not take the chance of knowing a reputed Gaullist. He employed a device which had worked on previous occasions, bringing it about that his presence in the city was mentioned in the newspapers. So, when he returned to Algiers, he found at his hotel a note in the familiar handwriting of his near-godson. Denis was living in one of the suburbs of the capital and said that he would call wherever Lanny asked. The P.A. wrote, appointing an hour and signing the name “Bienvenu.”

  It was a pleasant afternoon, and when Denis came they strolled into the extensive gardens of the hotel and found themselves a quiet seat in the shade of a great bougainvillaea vine. They weren’t exactly hiding, they were avoiding making themselves conspicuous in this spy-ridden town.

  Denis was only a year or two older than his brother, but he looked ten years older; there were lines of care in his face and traces of gray in his hair. He was of medium size, slender but strong. His dark eyes were melancholy and his manner grave, with none of Charlot’s humor and élan. He had been twice wounded in the course of desperate fighting near Maubeuge, and after he had recovered his health at home, he had had the devil’s own time escaping from the Germans and getting into Southern France. He had been hidden for a time on the Côte d’Azur and had come near seeking refuge in Bienvenu, but had decided that it wouldn’t be fair to Lanny’s mother.

  Now the young capitaine’s position was sad. He had made no open breach with his family, but the difference between his ideas and those of his father and brother made it impossible for them to co-operate, or, on account of the censorship, even to discuss the subject. Mail between Occupied and Unoccupied France was restricted by the Germans to a postcard with various printed statements, of which you crossed out those which did not apply. It was a criminal offense to use any sort of code—it might even carry the death penalty if you conveyed political or military information. So Denis, fils, could tell his father and his wife and children that he was well, and he could get the same news from them, but he could not tell them what he was thinking or ask what they were thinking.

  The brothers had been inseparable; and now, when Denis learned that Lanny had talked with Charlot in Vichy, it was pathetic to see his excitement. He wanted to hear every word that Charlot had spoken, and when he learned that his brother was helping to organize the Légion Tricolore in the service of Pierre Laval, his despair was pitiful to see. Nor was he comforted when Lanny hinted: “All those factional disputes are going to be wiped out, Denis. The American Army will be coming.” Denis didn’t ask when or where or how. He was thinking only about his brother and exclaimed: “They will shoot him!”

  “No,” declared Lanny, “the Americans won’t be like that. They will shoot only Germans.”

  “The French will shoot him, Lanny. They will call him a traitor, and he is a traitor! What defense can there be for a man who betrays la patrie into the hands of a fripon like Laval or for his apaches who seize French patriots and turn them over to the Nazis to be tortured and shot?”

  Lanny looked about him hastily. “Be careful,” he said, moving a little closer. “Remember, I am a foreigner, and I’m supposed to be here buying art works.”

  V

  Lanny had had weeks to think this problem over in advance. He knew that this young officer was the soul of honor. There was no one Lanny knew better or would trust more completely. The only question was, what his ideas were now, and whether they were such that he could fit in with American policies. If so, a presidential agent would have another contact, and one whose value might prove to be great.

  “Denis,” he began cautiously, “as you know, I have had nothing to do with political questions for many years. I have told myself that my work as an art expert justified me in keeping aloof, so that I could travel in all countries and meet all sorts of people. Now the fact that my country has been attacked makes that attitude more difficult.”

  “Vraiment, cher ami! I have been wondering how you could expect to keep it. I don’t see how any man can keep it in these times.”

  “I have been doing a lot of worrying over the question. Give me your advice about France. What do you think is going to happen, and what could I do to help?”

  “You ask me—and I have been looking forward to asking you! I am clear in my mind that De Gaulle is the man to whom France must look for salvation. What troubles me is my own course, whether to try to get to Britain and join him, or to stick it out here and do what I can to influence my friends and others. When I heard that you were here I was greatly pleased because I thought you would be able to tell me about America and what we have to expect from her.”

  “First, tell me about De Gaulle. You are in a position to hear his broadcasts?”

  “This is something secret, of course, for it is considered treason for an officer to listen to them. Vichy has reason to fear his words, for he thrills the soul of every true Frenchman who hears him. To me he has become a symbol of la France libérée. What do they think of him in America?”

  “One hears many different opinions, and people ask me to find out. Some are troubled because, so they say, he has Communists active in his London committee.”

  “But what can he do, Lanny? In war you have to accept what allies come to your standard. The Russians are fighting on our side, and even Churchill has had to welcome them. So has Roosevelt, unless I am misinformed.”

  “We know those men, and we can understand their maneuvers. But nobody that I know seems to have met De Gaulle, and so we find it harder to decide what is maneuver and what is his real belief.”

  “I do not know him, Lanny, bu
t I have read his book, Au Fil de l’Épée, and anybody who has studied it will know that he is a French patriot, pur sang. He is the last man in France who would be influenced by Red ideas; he stands for the rights of property, for order and discipline, for the defense of la patrie against foes inside and out.”

  “If Roosevelt can have his way in this war,” suggested Lanny mildly, “the slogan is to be democracy.”

  “I know, and we all use the word, but we give it our own meaning. To the Reds it means confiscation and dictatorship in the name of the proletariat; but Roosevelt means nothing like that, I am sure, and the order-loving people of France will not mean it either. If De Gaulle can have his way, there will be no more venal politicians stirring up the mob as a means of lining their own pockets.”

  Lanny let his friend talk and weighed his words carefully. Lanny had never seen the book of the new French Jeanne d’Arc—so De Gaulle had described himself—but he had seen extracts quoted. The very title, meaning “to the edge of the sword,” repelled the American, who couldn’t conceive a man using that title unless he meant to convey a threat. The quotations had had a decidedly Fascist color and indicated that the Colonel de Gaulle—so he had been when the book was published—was calling for something resembling what General Franco had done in Spain: the Fascist temper and technique, without the label, adapted to a Catholic culture and the purposes of the Church hierarchy.

  Right now Lanny’s attention was on his near-godson and what this London-sponsored crusade meant to him. Lanny was interested to discover that the defeat and enslavement of Marianne hadn’t changed the young capitaine’s social ideas a particle. He still believed in the right of the De Bruyne family, in co-operation with the other hundred and ninety-nine great families, to control French industry and finance, and, through the Army, control the government. He still wanted what Pétain wanted, a Catholic France, benevolently kept in order by the general staff. He would have endorsed the old Marshal’s slogan of fatherland, labor, and family. Lanny reflected that it shouldn’t be hard for the two brothers to get together after the war was over; they both wanted the same thing, the difference lay only in how they expected to get it.

  VI

  This realization would modify somewhat the extent to which Lanny could confide in his younger friend, but it didn’t change the basic fact that he had here a man of honor who could be of great use to the American Army, if and when it was ready to establish its pied-à-terre on French North African soil. If it was proper for General de Gaulle to use Reds, it would be equally proper for a P.A. to use a Catholic. So presently he said: “Denis, I am going to entrust you with a secret, and you must understand that it is the most confidential thing I have ever told you. You are not free to mention it to anybody else without first getting my approval and consent.”

  “Certainly, Lanny. I hope you are going to tell me that you have decided to be on the side of France in this dark hour.”

  “That is a part of it,” Lanny said and dropped his voice to a whisper. “The rest is that not long ago I had the good fortune to meet President Roosevelt and to gain his confidence. The reason I am here now is to sound out the situation and learn what the Americans have to expect if they should come to this shore.”

  “You mean that they are coming, Lanny?” This in a tone of excitement. “When?”

  “If I knew that, I could not say it. But the truth is, the decision has not yet been taken. This much is sure, however; before this war is over, our armies will come here. So no effort that is spent in inquiry and preparation will be wasted. If you accept that, and act upon it, you will surely not be disappointed.”

  A military man, who knew what secrecy was, could not ask more. Denis laid his hand on Lanny’s arm, and Lanny could feel it trembling. “That is the most wonderful news I have ever heard, and you may count upon me to the very death. I had about made up my mind to make a run for it and try to get to Brazzaville; but now I will stay, and you may consider me as under your orders.”

  “That is more than I would ask, cher ami,” replied Lanny with a smile. “I am not used to giving orders and am far too uncertain as to my own judgments. Let us say that we shall consult together. You give me the benefit of your knowledge of the local situation, and I will pass it on to the government without naming you or giving any indication of how I got it; that is, of course, unless you wish me to act otherwise.”

  “What I wish,” declared Denis fervently, “is to drive the Nazi doryphores out of France, and indeed off the earth.”

  “Très bien!” agreed the American. “But tell me, what is a doryphore?”

  “Oh, you haven’t heard that? A doryphore is a potato bug, and we apply it to the Germans because they demand and get nearly all of the French potato crop. In our food-saving campaigns we send the schoolchildren out to pick the bugs off the plants, and they have had the bright idea of carrying signs reading ‘Mort aux doryphores!’ The Germans can do nothing about that, so it gives delight to our people, who have not yet been entirely deprived of their sense of mischief.”

  VII

  They skipped their dinner, not wishing to appear together in any café, and continued their conference into the night. Lanny told about his talks with Lemaigre and with others of the ruling group in this colonial capital. (Nominally it was a part of “Metropolitan France,” and proud of that fact, but in most ways it resembled a colony.) Lanny was interested to observe the reactions of his old-time friend to the various cliques which were pulling and hauling the community’s political affairs. Denis, fils, despised the vegetable-oil man as a collaborator, but at the same time he respected him as a man of great affairs and as a friend of Denis, père. It was a worthy work that he had done, trying to save the taxpayers of France from being plundered by the mobsters; also, it was the most natural thing in the world that his friends of the Comité des Forges should be trying to save their funds by bringing them to North Africa. In fact, Denis, fils, took it for granted that his father would be in on such arrangements.

  Once more it was that powerful thing called “social position.” The scion of the De Bruynes enjoyed it, in spite of being one of the wicked Gaullists. He went about in the salons and was able to reveal to a P.A. many details of what was going on. The same thing had been true even in the Army; Denis had never said it, for that would have been bad taste, but Lanny had understood that he had been no mere capitaine, but a prospective heir to fortune and power, a man who might some day be able to offer social advantages to his major, his colonel, even his general.

  What was going to be the attitude of demobilized Army officers to an American landing? Denis reported that to a man they hated the Germans, and “collaboration” was not in their vocabulary. Many of them also disliked the British, but few objected to the Americans, and they would find it easier to tolerate an invasion by them. What stood in the way was their loyalty to the old Marshal. Denis himself despised the “old fraud,” as he called Pétain, saying that his piety was “political”—he was a freethinker, and married to a divorced woman. But to most of Denis’s brother officers the Marshal was still the hero of Verdun. “You know,” explained the capitaine, “we French have a notion of what we call ‘legitimacy’; our monarchy was based upon it, and the idea survived all the storms of the Revolution. The old Marshal is the legitimate head of our state, and especially of our Army; that authority has been properly handed on to him, and it is hard for us not to recognize it.”

  “Like the apostolic succession in the Church,” commented the American. With anyone else he would have smiled as he said it, but he knew that Denis was one of the faithful and would see nothing humorous in the idea that St. Peter had received power by the laying on of hands of the Lord, and that he had passed on that power to the bishops, and so it had come down, even through the blood-smeared hands of the Borgias. “The apostolic succession in grace conferred by ordination,” was the formula.

  Lanny inquired as to the attitude of the Navy, and Denis replied that the situation woul
d be far more delicate there. The officers of the Fleet were even more “legitimist” than those of the Army, and their hatred of the British was far more intense because of the pounding they had taken at Mers-el-Kébir. Any expeditionary force would have to be convoyed by the British, and the French would be strongly tempted to resist it. Propaganda was difficult to spread on board the ships, but Denis said he had whispered his ideas among such officers as he could trust. “Navies are always ultra-conservative,” he explained, and Lanny said that was true in America, even under the New Deal.

  VIII

  The time came when Denis asked the inevitable question: “Have you met Mr. Robert Murphy?” Lanny explained that he was working independently, observing the situation from all angles, and this diplomat was one of the objects of his attention. Denis had met him several times and reported that he was a good man for the post; he was gracious and genial and tried to understand all points of view. Denis had attempted to explain to him the position of the Gaullists, and Mr. Murphy had thanked him but had avoided committing himself.

  “Apparently,” said the capitaine, “your government has a prejudice against General de Gaulle which we, his admirers, do not understand and which no one will explain to us. Mr. Murphy would not admit it, and apparently he wanted me to believe that it was the policy of his government to maintain strict neutrality among the different factions of the French. But I happened to know from other sources that elaborate negotiations were carried on with ex-Premier Herriot, at his home in Lyon, urging him to come to North Africa and assume leadership of the Free French. When this plan did not succeed, they approached General Giraud, who just recently made his escape from the German fortress of Königstein. My understanding is that he is to come to Algiers for that purpose.”