Colonfay

by O'Grady, Myles;

  17. Dermot & Patrick

  They’re sitting in the Café de la Mairie in the Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris talking of Colonfay and of wars and rumors of wars.

  Patrick, nursing a pastis, unremarkable, thinking of his half-written story about—what else?—an invisible man. He would spend the day alone, writing, listening to Radio Classique. Solitary, self-effacing, and looking at the world through his one good but slightly jaundiced eye. Anyone looking less subversive than Laure’s brother, Patrick de Coucy, would be hard to find. Short, rotund, myopic, he would make John le Carré’s George Smiley look like Superman. It didn’t surprise Dermot that his work in progress was a story about an invisible man.

  Yet Patrick got up to some fine capers thirty years ago. Laure hardly knew him. She was a baby when he left home and after the war he refused to see any of the family except Laure. When their mother died he was obliged to go to a meeting at the notaire’s because he inherited some of her part of the fortune. He wanted to give it all to Laure, but was persuaded to keep his share for various technical and taxation reasons.

  From time to time Laure or Dermot had met him for lunch, but he was nearly always abroad. Now he had retired and was in ill health. He lived in a nondescript building in the fifth arrondissement. He had no pretensions, no ambitions, few illusions. His attitude towards his father reinforced Laure’s antagonism towards Armand. His wartime experiences served to harden his resolve never to have anything to do with him again. She concurred.

  He had never talked about the war years. Until now.

  This time Dermot was there to find out about the antagonisms which existed between Armand and his children. He simply couldn’t figure out why Laure especially was so anti her father. Why she so virulently rejected him. Patrick’s story explained half, but not the important part, of the rejection.

  They walked through the Luxembourg Garden and Patrick talked.

  In September 1939, at the beginning of the war, I was in Aix en Provence. I volunteered for the army. They took one look at my unsoldierly figure and near blindness in one eye and said no thanks. The idea of me drilling in a squad or charging the enemy must have seemed immediately preposterous.

  France fell. I was shocked and disgusted. I felt impotent. I had to do something. I was staying with my grandfather and my uncle René and I couldn’t listen to their adulation of the doddering old Pétain.

  There was a Jew at the Lycée Mignet, Professor Hallwachs. He knew Frenay in Lyon who was the founder of the Résistance group ‘Combat,’ and the printer of the journal of that name. I volunteered to distribute the paper. I was given first the department of Bouches du Rhône, and subsequently the entire southern region as my responsibility. At the beginning, I used to cycle around the territory, sometimes as far from Aix as Arles. This was no job for the timid. It demanded stamina and, I suppose, a certain amount of courage. Or folly. Who knows?

  Then I met a Dominican at St. Maximin, the famous Dom Bruckberger. He gave me the job of distributing books from a ‘Bibliobus de Provence.’ A travelling library. I was paid ten francs a day, to cover all my living expenses. The acetylene-powered bibliobus served as a useful distribution system for passing out Combat. Unfortunately, this dangerous contraption burnt out in Cassis, complete with the books, nearly immolating the inept driver. It was not replaced.

  One of my drops was a newspaper kiosk in Aix. The man who operated it was an idiot. He used to mix up ‘Combat’ and the local papers, with the consequence that people buying ‘Le Petit Marseillais’ would find themselves with the banned paper as well. The chap who had the kiosk was arrested one day. Not because the authorities found out about ‘Combat’ but because he was selling tobacco illegally. He grew it in his garden. However, they found ‘Combat.’ He tried to get off the hook. He said it was given to him by ‘Arthur.’

  ‘Arthur’ was my code name in the Résistance.

  They arrested us both. The kiosk man shared a cell with another member of the Résistance. He was instructed to tell the kiosk chap that if he identified me as the person who distributed Combat, he would be killed. This put the fear of God into him. The juge d’instruction called us before him. He asked the kiosk man formally to identify me as the source of the subversive literature. He said he could not. Definitely it was not me. But he was obviously frightened and the judge certainly knew that he was lying.

  I was granted provisional liberty until the proper case came up. I could have no contact with my friends in the Résistance. That was an absolute rule.

  Nothing that happened afterwards affected me as much as that experience in the jail in Aix. Being shaved in public from head to toe. Sharing a cell with a blind man. He said the prison orderly had blinded him by treating his eyes with the wrong stuff.

  Obscene graffiti on the filthy walls. Nests of bugs on the ceiling that fell on you at night. The bucket toilet. The stink. The sadism.

  I saw a guard stomping on a prisoner’s face in the courtyard. Kicking the life out of him. He could have been a guard in Belsen. Given the conditions, some men become animals. As the French army did in Algeria. Or the CRS, the compagnies républicaines de sécurité, the state security police, have been known to do on certain occasions.

  Just when I was let out of the prison in Aix the Germans occupied southern France. It became very unhealthy. I decided not to await the verdict of the court case. A doctor in Aix gave me a paper to say that I needed to go to the Pyrénées for my health. This got me a laissez passer.

  Three of us left Aix on a train. One was a young aristocrat, de Lanversin. It was tense. We detrained at Mont Louis. Walked to the village of Bolquere. Waited for a man to guide us to the Spanish side. We stayed in the little auberge for two days. We paid 100 francs each to the guide. We climbed in snow, slept in an animal shelter. It took one whole day, a night, and another half day, but we walked only by night.

  This was November 1942. It was a survival course. I didn’t think I’d make it. But I managed to keep up with the rest. The guide abandoned us on the frontier and pointed the way towards Barcelona. We managed to get far enough inside the frontier so that when we were picked up by the Guardia Civil, we were not immediately returned to France but were taken to the village of Camprodon, fifteen kilometers inside Spain, where we were kept in the school. There were others there already.

  It was not good for an escaper to be French. The French Embassy was Pétainist and would have demanded my return to France. Then, the penalty would have been severe. So, using the broken English and local knowledge acquired during a year I spent in Kent, I claimed British nationality and assumed the name ‘Jack Howat.’

  In the temporary jail was a Jewish banker who spoke perfect English and recognized that I was not English. Naturally he kept quiet about it.

  We moved to Gerona for a week, and then Figueras for a month.

  While we were being marched to the station in Gerona, roped together, twenty of us in file like convicts on Devil Island, a Spanish policeman said to me, “See that man over there? He’s the British Consul.”

  I took the hint and beckoned the man over. I told him I was English. The Consul asked my name and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll remember you.”

  The prison in Figueras was indescribably squalid. There were twelve in a cell ‘être au secret’, meaning we were never allowed to leave it.

  Sometimes you had to sleep with your head under the WC, with people shitting in it perched above you. I have always been too cerebral and fastidious. Constant bowel movements are not Beethoven sonatas. Someone said God couldn’t have made humans: He wouldn’t have made them shit.

  The Spanish jailers were not deliberately cruel, merely indifferent.

  When we were due to leave Figueras, we were told to be ready to move the next morning The Jewish banker—his name was Weinstein, I think, and he too had escaped over the mountain with the Gestapo on his heels—extracted a wad of notes from his shoe and gave every man a hundred pesetas. This was a useful gift. I wish I knew
who he was. He did not leave with us and I never saw him again.

  We were taken by train, a hundred of us crowded into horse wagons, for the forty-eight hour journey. There was a stop every eight hours for ten minutes to let us pee. We arrived at the concentration camp of Miranda de Ebro on Christmas night. I stayed there until the end of April, 1943.

  This concentration camp had a long-term population of various nationalities, mostly from the International Brigade of the Civil War. A sizeable percentage were Poles. They resented the newcomers. It disturbed their established routine of bribery of guards and appropriation of the meager rations. They were inhuman. When the food arrived, on one big platter, they would sometimes knock it over.

  I saw one man, hungry, fall to his knees and try to eat off the floor. The Poles battered him on the head with a plank.

  Survival was a battle. Your unsoldierly brother- in-law won through.

  In the camp, every morning, the colors were raised and the band played the Spanish national anthem. The Spanish soldiers, a ragged and undisciplined bunch, showed little respect for the ceremony but the prisoners were obliged to give the fascist salute.

  There was a Jew from Vienna in the band. He played the clarinet. Afterwards, he whistled a Beethoven sonata. I finished it. We became friends. He had been imprisoned in a camp in Austria but escaped. I was bemused by the fact that he said he wanted to escape from his wife as much as from the Nazis.

  During my time in the camp, I, being ‘English,’ received packages of cigarettes and chocolate from the British Embassy in Madrid, and in April was one of the first to be liberated. I was sprung by the Military Attaché and taken to a hotel in Madrid.

  I couldn’t sleep. The luxury of sheets and a proper bed was too unfamiliar an experience. Next morning, I took a train to La Linea, near Gibraltar, and crossed in a small boat with a British Ensign to the fortress.

  There the collected French were paraded. We were asked to fall in according to whether we wanted to join de Gaulle in England or Giraud in Algeria. Twice as many opted for Giraud as for de Gaulle. About eighty versus forty. This tells you quite a lot about de Gaulle’s standing at that time. Giraud was always a questionable commodity. Brave enough and an escaper from a German camp, perhaps with the connivance of Vichy and his captors, to undermine the authority of the ‘traitor,’ de Gaulle, he was an ego-maniac and a wavering Pétainist. But he was seen to be a more legitimate army commander than de Gaulle and he was backed by Roosevelt. The groups divided and never met after that parade.

  I went aboard the American ship, the ‘Santa Rosa,’ and we remained in harbor for some time waiting for a convoy to assemble. We sailed for the Clyde with an escort of warships. I didn’t like being in the bowels of the ship so, using my head instead of my muscles, I volunteered to help man a gun. I escaped to the superstructure.

  We landed at Greenock. I was taken under escort to London. We were billeted first in a miserable old peoples’ home in a tawdry suburb, before going to the ‘Patriotic School,’ this in a sumptuous castle.

  English intelligence officers interviewed me three or four times a day to see whether I was a kosher patriot or just an infiltrated spy. One of the intelligence officers asked if I would be prepared to be dropped by parachute into France, somewhere near Grenoble. Being an odd shape to be dropped out of an aircraft, I thought this was a trifle too precarious but, after all, why not? I asked for a few days to think it over.

  I went to La Maison d’Accueil, where a certain Colonel Corniglion-Molinier, a friend of Malraux, kept me in luxury in the mansion for three days.

  The famous Résistance leader, Colonel Rémy (Gilbert Renault) came to get me.

  I told him about the English proposal. Rémy blew up.

  He said, “Absolutely not! I need you to work with me.”

  He took me to the small studio he inhabited and I slept there for a week before being ejected to find quarters for myself.

  No more talking.

  I spent the war in London working on intelligence. Sorting out reports that were picked up every night by Lysander or brought to England in fishing boats. There was nothing heroic about the job.

  All my friends from Aix died in camps.

  That’s why I have no stomach for La Fontanelle or Colonfay. It’s why I can do without contact with my father. But he did help us once.

  I hope all the Vichyists rot in hell.

  Patrick continued, “It’s nothing to shout about but at least one of us was on the right side. As for the family, they got what they deserved.”

  Dermot said, “The family acted as most people would have acted at that time. Your father could not have gone to England as you did. He had dependants. There’s no great merit in going off if you’re single with no responsibilities. His job was to send labor forces to Germany. He fought every day with his German counterpart. Who knows how many lives he saved?”

  “But how many did he kill by shipping them away to Germany?”

  “The lesser of two evils, Patrick. He told me once that he managed to give them half of what they wanted. Give him the benefit of the doubt. I do.”

  “You don’t have to live with the family’s sick affiliations. You have no idea how reactionary they were before the war. And now.”

  “Oh, look, Patrick, you know that half the collaborators were rewarded after the war with safe jobs. Some have the Medal of the Résistance. Thus are the just punished and the guilty let go free.”

  “Dermot, you’re you and I’m me. Maybe in the fullness of time I’ll be reconciled with him but not yet. Until he admits my Jewish friends to the house, I’ll stay out.”