by Alexis Jenni
Shouts rang out from the direction of the lodge. Group One arrived, holding the last Seers by the shoulders, bewildered, ambushed from behind as they were rushing towards the commotion. They had run heedlessly, confident that they could make multiple captures with a single blink, keeping out of reach, their eyes their only weapon. But no. Every one was captured.
‘And there you have it,’ said Salagnon.
‘But we saw you first,’ they protested.
‘You didn’t say their names. No name, no game. Losers have no rights, they shut their traps. Let’s head back.’
The young priest had made himself comfortable in the scouts’ hut, near the stove lit with twigs and kindling. They marched in, making him jump; he got to his feet quickly, dropping the book of which he had just read a single page. He picked it up again and held it back to front so the boys could not see the title.
‘We won, Father.’
‘Already? But the game was supposed to last at least two hours.’
The Touchers roughly pushed the dejected Seers, each flanked by two boys, into the hut. The boy who had been tossed into the brambles was no less eager than his teammates, shoving his prisoners just a little harder than was necessary to guide them; and they allowed themselves to be pushed.
‘Well, congratulations, Salagnon. You are a fine leader.’
‘This is all foolishness, Father. These are children’s games.’
‘Games are a way of preparing for adulthood.’
‘There’s no such thing as adulthood in France now, Father, not for men, anyway. The whole country is peopled by women and children, and one old man.’
Embarrassed, the priest did not know what to say. The subject was a sensitive one, Salagnon’s tone perhaps provocative. His cold blue eyes tried to pierce his. The scouts huddled around the stove, where the fire of twigs gave scant warmth.
‘Good. Well then, if the game is over, let’s stay here for a while. Send out the prisoners to collect firewood, that’ll teach them. Stoke the fire, gather round. We’ll tell some stories. I propose that we recount Captain Salagnon’s gallant feats in the appropriate manner. With an epic poem and an ode to his glory. We’ll publish it in the patrol journal and he can provide the illustrations of the battle himself, with his lively brushstrokes. Because a hero is not only the one who wins, but the one who knows how to proclaim his victory.’
‘As you wish, Father,’ said Salagnon in a tone that was ironic or perhaps bitter, he was not sure himself; and he assigned the tasks, divided up the groups and supervised the activity. Before long the fire was roaring.
The day was already drawing in. The darkness became impenetrable, and this happened more quickly in the park than it did in the city. The stove crackled; through its open door they could see the embers flicker and throb with light like the surface of a star. Sitting huddled on the floor, scouts listened to tales invented by the others. Shoulder pressed against shoulder, thigh against thigh, they made the most of the accumulated body heat. They gave themselves up to simple dreams based on simple perceptions related to the group, to rest, to heat. Salagnon was bored, but he liked these little scouts. The flickering fire cast shadows on their faces, throwing their wide eyes, their plump cheeks, their fleshy, childlike lips into sharp relief. Although scouting was an admirable institution, he thought to himself, it was curious to be playing such games at seventeen. His director of studies understood this. He in turn might become a priest, a scout leader, look after children, devote himself to a future generation that might escape the fate of this one. He might become like this man sitting among them who smiled at the angels, wedged in by the shoulders of the two biggest boys, arms cradling his cassock-covered knees. But the light he sometimes saw in the priest’s eyes deterred him. He did not want to take this man’s place. But what place could he take in the France of 1943?
He did as he was told: he drew sketches for the patrol newspaper. He took pleasure in this, people praised his talent. Because this, too, is art: creating a space in which to enjoy oneself, setting its boundaries, inhabiting it with one’s whole being, and getting praise for it to boot. But he was not sure that the life of a man could be bounded by a sheet of drawing paper.
The inspection came about. They arrived at night, four of them, like guests; a bored officer led the way, because his gait was longer than the others’; trailing behind came a civil servant from the préfecture, swaddled in coat and scarf, hat pushed down over his eyes, clutching a leather briefcase; two soldiers with rifles at their shoulders followed in step behind.
The officer saluted with a click of his heels, though he did not remove his cap. He was on duty, for which he apologized. The civil servant shook Salagnon père by the hand for a little too long, and made himself comfortable. He put down his coat, keeping his scarf on, set his briefcase on the table and opened it. They brought him the ledgers. One soldier stayed by the door, rifle at his shoulder, while the other disappeared into the storeroom to inspect the shelves.
Teetering on the stepladder, he was soon covered in a film of brown dust. He read the labels and barked figures in German. The civil servant ran a pen down the columns and asked detailed questions, which the officer translated into his brutish tongue; from the depths of the storeroom the soldier called back the answers, which the officer translated into a mellifluous French for the benefit of the official sitting behind him, not looking at him. One hand in his pocket, which rucked the tails of his jacket, the tall, slim officer perched a single buttock on the table like a bird about to take wing. His shoulders were straight, his cap tilted at a rakish angle, the neatly pressed trousers tucked into his moulded boots. He was not yet thirty, though it was impossible to be more precise, since in his face youth warred with hard-won experience. A purple scar traced a line across his temple, along his cheek and down his neck, disappearing into the collar of his black jacket. He was an SS officer, his cap emblazoned with a Totenkopf, but no one could remember his rank. Thus suspended, an elegant bird of prey, a nonchalant athlete, he resembled one of those extraordinarily beautiful posters which proclaimed that, throughout Europe, the SS dispassionately settled matters of life and death.
Sitting behind him, facing the official going over the accounts, Salagnon was working on his Latin composition; in the margin of his notebook he sketched the scene: the motionless soldier, the official bent over his task, the officer who waited with obvious indifference for these day-to-day problems to be resolved; and his own father smiling, candid, open, amenable to all requests, biddable without being obsequious, friendly without being cloying, with the aloofness that might be expected of the vanquished; a magnificent performance.
At last the official closed the ledger, pushed back his chair, sighed.
‘Monsieur Salagnon, your books are entirely in order. You have respected the laws of wartime economy. Do not think that we doubted it for a minute, but these are terrible times and we are obliged to verify.’
He concluded his remarks with an exaggerated wink behind the back of the German. Salagnon père returned the wink then turned to the officer.
‘I have to say I’m relieved. Everything is so complicated these days…’ His lips quivered with a suppressed smile. ‘It’s so easy to make a mistake whose consequences in wartime could be incalculable. May I offer you a glass of my finest cognac?’
‘We shall take our leave. There will be no drinks. We did not come here for an aperitif, Monsieur, we came to investigate your dealings.’
The official snapped shut his briefcase and pulled on his coat, helped by an anxious Salagnon, who dared not insist. The German declining to accept his offer unsettled him.
Emerging from the storeroom, the soldier dusted himself off and carefully buckled the chinstrap of his helmet. Hands behind his back, the officer paced distractedly while waiting for the others to finish dressing. He paused behind Victorien, leaned over the boy’s shoulder and ran a gloved finger under a line of text.
‘That verb should take the accusative
rather than the dative, young man. You need to pay attention to your cases. You French people often get it wrong. You don’t know how to decline a verb, you’re not accustomed to it as we are.’
He tapped the page to drum in his advice, dislodging the page on which Victorien had been writing. He noticed the sketch in the margin: the soldier standing stiffly to attention as though carved in stone, the officer, seen from behind, like a crestfallen bird, the official bent over the ledger, peering over the glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, and Salagnon père, smiling, tipping him the wink. Victorien blushed, but made no move to cover the drawing, it was too late. The officer placed his hand on his shoulder and squeezed.
‘Be careful in your translations, young man. These are difficult times. Devote your energies to your studies.’
His hand took wing, the officer stood up straight, barked an order in German and the men trooped out together; the officer leading the way, the two privates bringing up the rear. On the threshold he turned back to Victorien. Without smiling, he gave him a wink, then disappeared into the darkness. Salagnon père closed the door, waited in silence for a few moments, then stamped his feet with joy.
‘We got them! They didn’t suspect a thing. You have a great gift, Victorien, your work is perfect!’
‘Do men know why they survive the battle? Seldom through bravery, more often through indifference: the indifference of an enemy who, on a whim, chose to strike another; the indifference of Fate, which chose to forget us this time.’
‘What’s that you’re saying?’
‘It’s the text I’m translating.’
‘Foolishness, your Latin verses. The cunning survive, that’s all there is to it. A little luck, a little silver-tongued eloquence and you’re home free. Leave your Romans in their graves and go and do something useful. A little bookkeeping, for example.’
Victorien carried on with his homework, not daring to look up at his father. The officer’s wink would for ever remain his worst memory of that war.
The uncle reappeared, had his dinner, slept and was off again in the morning. No one dared tell him about the inspection. They sensed that telling him that everything had gone well would not have made him happy; on the contrary, it would have piqued his contempt, even his anger. The uncle was a brute, the times willed it so; these were no times for the soft-hearted. Over the past fifteen years the whole world had seen a gradual increase in seriousness. In the 1940s this brute force reached an intensity that was difficult for a human frame to endure. The soft-hearted suffered most. They withered, became limp. They dissolved into a viscous liquid. They ended up as compost, an ideal nutrient that allowed others to grow more swiftly, more aggressively, and thereby win the race for sunlight.
The uncle had fought in this war for the two months of France’s involvement. He had been issued a rifle, one that he cleaned, checked and oiled every night, but he had never fired a shot, except in the practice grounds behind the Maginot Line. He spent three-quarters of the year in a blockhouse, his rifle by his side, guarding fortifications so well designed that they were never captured. France was captured, but not these ramparts worthy of Vauban, which were abandoned without so much as a crack in their handsome, camouflaged concrete.
It was cosy inside. Everything was provided. The previous war had been marked by crude, makeshift work. The French trenches had been hellish quagmires, so utterly disorganized, so shoddy compared to the others; they had so admired the captured enemy trenches – so clean, so sturdy, so well drained – that they had decided to make up for lost time. All the problems thrown up by the previous war were painstakingly resolved. By 1939 France was in excellent shape to fight the battles of 1915. As a result, the uncle had spent several months underground in a barrack room that was clean, not infested by rats and considerably less damp than the muddy dugouts in which his father had once rotted – literally rotted, with fungus sprouting between his toes. They alternated between air raid warnings, target practice and sunbathing in an underground room fitted with UV lights that they entered wearing sunglasses. Army medics reckoned that, given the heavy fortifications of the garrisons, rickets would be more lethal than enemy fire.
Early in May they were moved to a forested area that was less well fortified. The weather was conducive to working in the woods, the earth beneath their spades remained dry and smelled wholesome. They dug in around the gunners, who had hidden their barrels in holes camouflaged with logs. By mid-May, having heard no sound but their comrades’ jokes, the song of the birds and the rustle of the wind in the leaves, they discovered that they had been outflanked. The Germans were advancing steadily in a roar of engines and bombs, something they remained blissfully unaware of as they lay down on the soft moss beneath the trees for their afternoon nap. Their officers discreetly suggested that they leave, and within the space of two days, in flakes and fragments, the whole regiment disappeared.
They walked the country roads in groups that grew ever smaller, ever more distant, until eventually they were only a handful, all friends together, heading more or less south-east without encountering a soul. Only the odd car that had run out of petrol by the roadside or an abandoned farm whose inhabitants had fled days earlier, leaving their livestock milling around the dirt farmyards.
France was silent. Under a summer sky, with no breath of wind, no cars and no sounds but their footsteps on the gravel, they walked along tree-lined roads, between hedges, weighed down by their rifles and their uniforms. May 1940 was gloriously hot. They felt stifled in their regulation greatcoats; their puttees clung to their legs; their coarse cloth caps produced sweat without absorbing it; their long rifles jolted and clanked and proved useless as walking sticks. Slowly but surely they tossed everything into the ditches and walked on in trousers and shirtsleeves, bare-headed. They even threw away their rifles. After all, what use were they? An encounter with an enemy unit would have left them dead. Some were keen to take pot-shots at lone soldiers, but, given the enemy’s organization, such small pleasures would have cost them dear; besides, even the braggarts knew that it was just talk, a way not to lose face; at least verbally, since in every other sense they had already lost face. So they tossed away their rifles, having deactivated them just to be safe, to comply with regulations, and they walked on unencumbered. Passing a deserted house they rummaged through the wardrobes and helped themselves to civilian clothes. Gradually, they ceased to be soldiers, their fervour melting like hoarfrost at sunrise, until they were no more than a group of tired young men heading home. Some cut themselves walking sticks, others slung their jackets over their arm, and it was a pleasant stroll under the bright May sun on the deserted country roads of the Lorraine.
It lasted only until they encountered the Germans. A column of grey tanks parked under the trees along a trunk road. The bare-chested tank crews lay sunning themselves on their machines, smoking, eating and laughing, their bronzed, handsome bodies utterly unscarred. A line of French prisoners marched up in the opposite direction, led by veteran reservists clutching their rifles like fishing rods. The tank crew sat, dangling their legs, calling out to each other, joking and taking photos. The prisoners seemed older, gaunter, more unkempt; they trudged through the dust, shamefaced adults walking along with heads bowed through the barrage of jeers from these handsome young athletes in bathing suits. With a snap of the fingers, the uncle and his group were captured. Literally. A potbellied guard snapped his fingers, shot them a look like a schoolteacher and gestured to the column of men. Without so much as a question, without taking the trouble to count them, they were added to the daily growing procession marching north-east.
This was too much; the uncle ran away. Many ran away; it was not without risk, but it was not difficult. It simply meant taking advantage of the scarcity of guards, a momentary lack of attention, a bend in the road, a thicket of bushes; at every turn a few prisoners slipped away. Some were caught and dragged back, summarily shot and dumped in a ditch. But some managed to escape. ‘What I find astoni
shing, what I always found astonishing,’ the uncle used to say, ‘was how few people ran. Everyone blindly obeyed.’ The predisposition to obey is overwhelming, it is one of the commonest human traits; blind obedience can always be relied on. The greatest army in the world voluntarily disbanded and willingly went to the prison camps. Meek obedience achieved what bombs could never have done. It takes only a click of the fingers: we’re used to it. When people don’t know what to do, they do as they are told. He looked as though he knew what to do, this man who clicked his fingers. Obedience is so deep-rooted in our slightest gestures we no longer notice it. We follow. The uncle never forgave himself for submitting to that order. Never.
Victorien did not understand what his uncle meant. He did not see himself as obedient. He did his translations, he learned Latin through reading old books, but that was education, not obedience. And he drew; something no one had ever asked of him. So he listened to his uncle and thought of his stories as fascinating tales. One day he would leave, but for now he would carry on with his life at school.
