Anna

by Norman Collins

  It had long since become unsafe for Anna to venture out alone. M. Latourette, on tenterhooks the whole time as his contract for cavalry belts at last really looked like going through, had extracted a promise that she would go nowhere without his permission. To be arrested for harbouring a German was a nightmare that pursued him even by day. And he was almost as terrified of concentrating attention on himself by making Anna declare herself. He conceived wild plans for getting rid of her, thought of remote farmhouses in the Loire where she could be lodged in seclusion until the war was over; considered sending her to England. He even contemplated the possibility of denouncing her to the authorities and so putting himself on the right side of the law. But, in the result, she remained there in the Latourette apartment, spending whole hours gazing down into the street below.

  Madame Latourette would enter the room and seeing Anna’s back at the window would withdraw again hurriedly, as though reluctant to catch her eye. Her hatred, since Charles had gone, had mounted dangerously.

  As for Anna herself, she gave no sign of any emotion. She read a little, played sometimes on the piano when the sound of music was not too irritating to Madame Latourette’s nerves, and amused M. Latourette in the evenings. She also wrote. As letters had now become impossible—it was nearly three weeks since they had received any word from Charles, and then only a scribbled note post-marked from Nancy and heavily censored—she took refuge in her diary. It became a private, nightly, confessional.…

  “It is now the nineteenth day since I have heard from him,” she recorded. “He might be stationed in the next street and I should not know. How long can such uncertainty be endured? If anything happens to him I shall kill myself. I shall jump from this window into the street below: it will be the only way left to show how much I love him. Why does he not write to me? Is it because he is afraid of my name on an envelope? Afraid of what would happen if the police saw it? But if that is so, why does he not enclose a note inside a letter to his mother? All that I need is to see his name and mine on the same sheet of paper and I should be happy. Or has he written and have they destroyed his letters? Can it be that they know the truth and are deliberately torturing me? My prayers now mean nothing to me. Last night I prayed to the Virgin, and she might have been made of stone. I am left alone without Charles, without friends and without God. When I discovered that I was not going to bear Charles’s child, I wept. I have nothing now by which I can remember him. I stand in the drawing-room looking at the daguerrotype of him as a schoolboy. But what does it mean to me? It is my whole body that loves him, not only my eyes …”

  The writing became sprawling and spidery as she grew sleepy, and finally she locked the fresh page away in her trunk and turned out the light.

  Next morning, when she re-read it, it brought tears into her eyes again.

  It was only after it was dark that she went out. M. Latourette would deliberately let the light fade from the sky and then suggest that she might care to stroll with him for a little. He made the same proposal every evening; and every evening Madame Latourette suffered fresh paroxysms of jealousy. It hurt that he had long since given up asking her. She could, however, have spared herself. These promenades were the most prosaic, exemplary affairs. M. Latourette chose the quieter streets, and the two of them walked along together in silence. M. Latourette had warned her of the dangers of being heard speaking in the streets with a German accent.

  On occasion, he would allow himself to sit with her for a few minutes in some out of the way café where he was not known. And he enjoyed such moments. It was, he supposed, the basic emotion of fatherhood, enriched by something a shade more piquant. He had often regretted that he had never had a daughter.

  On these outings, Anna remained charming and suitably grateful. And she remembered to smile whenever M. Latourette looked in her direction. In the end, however, the dullness of his company always overcame her, and she would forget him. She would sit with her café crême in front of her, studying the people at the neighbouring tables.

  “They are members of a lost nation,” she would tell herself. “They are trivial and insignificant, and they are fighting a country that has been preparing for a decade for this war that at last has broken out. They will be swept away if they resist, trampled under foot if they surrender.”

  And always at this moment her thoughts would return to Charles.

  “My darling,” the thought would come to her again, “they will kill you. They will kill everyone they encounter. You do not under stand—no one in France understands —how ruthless my people can be once they have gone to war. To you it is simply an adventure. To them it is a task to be performed like any other.”

  And she would grow restless, and M. Latourette would tap on the side of his glass with a five-franc piece to attract the waiter, and then lead her home again, through the same quieter streets.

  Her little hour of gaiety would be over.

  V

  The war, meanwhile, had developed a new and terrifying momentum: the armies of France appeared everywhere to be rolling back before the Germans. Even the most optimistic had been prepared for a minor reverse here, a set-back there. But this was something so utterly different as to send a chill through the heart. Already the whole of the land forces of the country were retreating in two great bodies, MacMahon’s routed contingents fleeing from Woerth in the direction of Saverne, and Bazaine’s army, with its right wing crushed, retiring to the shelter of Metz. And every step that MacMahon’s men took, widened the gap between the two portions of the French army. The dent which the Germans had started had already become a bulge.

  The mind of the public, stunned at first by the realisation of these disasters, had gradually recovered and re-oriented itself. It now recognised—in other words, M. Latourette and the waiter in the Café Nice and the doorkeeper at the Ministry and the old gentleman in the apartment across the landing recognised it—that the war had changed almost overnight from a victorious campaign leading right into the heart of Germany to a desperate defensive action to be fought on French soil. There were rumours, too, of the ugliest kind going about. Why had bridges not been blown up and tunnels wrecked? people asked. The invading German troops, it seemed, had come through the vital tunnels of Saverne and Phalsbourg as easily as on manœuvres. And M. Latourette and the waiter at the Café Nice and the doorkeeper at the Ministry and the old gentleman in the apartment across the landing began to talk under their breath of treachery on the largest scale, of secret pacts with the Germans, of conspiracies between the Chancellor and certain of the Generals, and of nameless people close to the Emperor himself who did not want France to win.

  The public mind finally consoled itself with the thought that, even if they could not beat the Germans, at least once their troops had withdrawn for a sufficient distance they would be in safety. Safety was now the one preoccupation of the nation. Metz and Sedan became imprinted on the national consciousness as twin cities of refuge. They were inviolable fortresses into which temporarily-defeated soldiers might come to rest.

  The gloomy ones, the pessimists and defeatists, even began thinking of Paris in the same light. They saw the capital as something solid and impregnable—with the test of its impregnability taking place at its very walls. But the answer to such admissions of despair was being given meanwhile by the Government in the most vigorous and impressive fashion. If in peace-time the Third Empire had been slow and lethargic, in war it was showing itself vigorous and immense. The idea that a war could be fought between armies was abandoned, and the whole armed might of the nation was enlisted. The Gardes Mobiles were hurriedly summoned to man the second line of defences that no one had imagined would in any circumstances be used. And the fact that the Gardes Mobiles were practically without training and were utterly untried in war was forgotten in the impressiveness of their vast numbers.

  Moreover, it was reassuring for people to discover that the Emperor’s plans, always rather grandiose and tinged with purple, were being reham
mered under the pressure of events into something a little more practical. An expedition originally intended to

  sail to the Baltic under naval escort, and so strike the enemy a devastating blow in its undefended rear, was recalled, and the troops were brought forward to meet the peril that was really there.

  France at last was truly at war.

  Unfortunately, however, by the time the war was only three weeks’ old, the whole of the country to the east of the Moselle was already in German hands.

  Interlude with one of the Victors

  He had been seated in his chair for over an hour, without moving, The pale Rhine light had dwindled in the sky and the room was now almost in darkness. His pipe, which had gone out from neglect, lay cold within his hand.

  He rose finally, and rang the bell. The wires scraped audibly along the walls and there was a jangling in the kitchen below. Herr Karlin returned to his chair.

  It was the housekeeper who answered his call. She came in carrying a taper and began lighting the lamps. She did not say a word and Herr Karlin did not speak to her. But the housekeeper did not seem surprised by his silence. Since Anna’s disappearance the household had been one of long silences.

  But when she reached the door Herr Karlin stopped her.

  “You have made up the parcel of Fraulein Anna’s dresses?” he asked.

  The housekeeper replied that she had done so.

  “You have included everything, shoes, hats, the coat she wore when riding?”

  “Everything, Herr Karlin.”

  “And her books?”

  “I have made a separate parcel of the books.”

  Herr Karlin paused. He appeared to be arguing something in his own mind. And when he spoke his voice was flat and without life in it. “You will burn the books,” he said. “Novels are better burnt. They corrupt if they are left lying where children may get hold of them.”

  “And the clothes, Herr Karlin? I have put them in Fraulein Anna’s wardrobe.”

  Herr Karlin paused again.

  “It is a sin to burn good clothes,” he said at last. “They must be given away. The priest will tell you where to send them.”

  “But, Herr Karlin …”

  The man in the chair gave a little gesture of irritation.

  “But what?” he asked.

  “But if Fraulein Anna comes back?”

  “Fraulein Anna will not be coming back.”

  “But how can you be sure? I pray every night for her return.”

  Herr Karlin drew the china tobacco jar toward him and began filling his pipe.

  “Fraulein Anna will not be coming back to this house,” he repeated.

  There was another silence after this remark, but it seemed for a moment as if the housekeeper would break it. Her lips moved and she spread out the palms of her hands towards him as if she were going to appeal to him. But the figure of Herr Karlin did not encourage her. He was sitting bolt upright in his chair, his meerschaum in his hand, staring straight past her. His eyes were fixed and without any expression in them. The housekeeper took another look at him and then withdrew.

  When she had gone, Herr Karlin rose and went over to the big escritoire in the corner. He unlocked one of the drawers and removed a heavy volume that was fastened with a clasp. There was his initial embossed on the cover in heavy gold. And it was not his alone. Entwined, with the elaborate fancy of the letterer’s art, was another initial—the letter M. There they were, the two initials, his and his wife’s, embracing everlastingly.

  He opened the tome and the faded daguerrotypes stared up at him. There was himself as a boy—the picture by now was so faint that it was only the ghost of himself that remained, a ghost in tight dark jacket and a white collar like a small civil servant. He appeared again, this ghost, as a young man against a photographer’s background of palms and fretted woodwork; beside his first horse; in a gymnasium with padded waistcoat and foil. But Herr Karlin turned them over, the brown, dusky portraits flickering by, until he came upon the pictures of himself and Marie. He sat looking at them closely. The memory of her came back and hurt him afresh. He remembered her moods, her tantrums, her migraines. But the sight of the large eyes under the slanting eyebrows, the lavish hair piled up in profusion, the tiny chin and the long, sloping shoulders, stirred him: he knew that he would still have been defenceless before them. On the opposite page was his Marie in the sunlight of the garden, with a child in her arms. The child was Anna.… Pushing his thumb nail under the corner of the print, he lifted it up and then ripped it from the page. And soon there were other pictures of Anna in the album—a whole gallery of them from babyhood to girlhood. His favourite of all of them was there. She had been thirteen at the time, and she was wearing the white dress of her first communion. She was like a bride. Under the short veil, her eyebrows slanted upwards over the large eyes, and the tiny chin was supported on a slim neck leading to the same sloping shoulders. But he destroyed this, too, with the others. The carpet round his chair was now littered with the torn fragments from the album. When he had finished, all memory of Anna had been obliterated from the album for ever. She might never have lived, never have been conceived, for all that remained of her.

  He did not put the album away at once. He sat brooding over what he had just done. It seemed to him now more than ever that it was a life that he had destroyed. Marie was dead; and Anna had gone the way of her. There wasn’t even Berthe now. He had packed her off to an aunt in Hanover because he had been frightened of the influence that the house might have had on her; had sent her away so that she might be able to forget her sister. There was no one else in the house now but the servants.

  Even the Baron was absent: he had rejoined his regiment and was nursing his broken heart somewhere on French soil at this very moment. He had declared before going that he hoped a French bullet would pierce his breast in the first encounter and so end the misery that he was suffering: Herr Karlin envied him his opportunity.

  The clock in the hall struck, and the other clocks in the house began chiming as well. Herr Karlin roused himself. Gathering up the jumble of fragments from the floor, he threw them by handfuls into the fire. They smouldered for a moment and then blazed. Herr Karlin stood stupidly staring at them.

  Twenty years of his life, and everything that had made him happy in it, had gone up in that whirl of flame.

  Chapter XI

  I

  Charles shifted from one foot to the other—both feet were aching— and went on listening.

  The General who addressed them had been as eloquent as a politician. He told them that their country was in deadly peril, that Rome was again facing the barbarians, and that only their steel now stood between the women of France and ravishment. He was an old man, the General, but the thought of ravishment still appeared to rouse him. His colour mounted and his last few words were declaimed at the top of his voice.

  The ceremony would have been longer—the General still had two pages of notes left—but for the sound of heavy gunfire across the valley. The reverberations of the first volley cut everything short. The General relinquished the men to their colonel, and rode hurriedly off with his staff. He was the only man on the field who knew that all the French artillery had been moved farther away to the south to avoid capture, and that it must be German guns that they were hearing.

  The men themselves were apprehensive. They had already witnessed one extraordinary episode which had shaken their confidence in their commander and in their own ability to make a stand anywhere in this campaign of forced retreats. They had actually seen the Imperial Army, which the Emperor had now entrusted body and soul to MacMahon, in full retreat through Metz.

  This glorious body of men, which was the pride of France, had passed through the winding streets of Metz and become an immovable mass on the narrow bridges. A pair of travelling circuses meeting at a cross-roads could not have caused greater confusion. The bridges were the scene of rival columns fighting for their places, and all men were enemies
. Colonels challenged the precedence of advantageously placed Majors. Captains ordered back soldiers of other regiments. And Generals sulked. And all the time the rest of the army was piling up behind. Guns, field-kitchens, pontoon bridges, ammunition limbers, hospital wagons, and brass bands were all brought crushing into the city, each contributing its quota to the chaos. And so great had been the panic to reach Metz, and leave it behind again, that there had been no time to blow up the bridges over the Moselle behind them.

  Everything, in fact, that panic and folly could do to assist the advance of the Germans had been faithfully contributed.

  And in the mind of every man who had taken part in that inglorious steeplechase was one question: “Why is it that we never know where the Germans are while they know every move as soon as it is made?” This question, indeed, puzzled every one from Marshal le Boeuf downwards. It perplexed the officers in charge of reconnaissance, whose scouts brought back no information. And it perplexed the scouts themselves, who all the time were out-scouted. The unpleasant suspicion began to crystallise in the minds of all but the stupid that perhaps the Prussian military training had been better than the French. The one consolation that remained was to be found in the immemorial truth that in warfare the only people who do not know the progress of a campaign are the soldiers who are taking part in it.

  But, even so, retreat is something that cannot be disguised. The distinctive odour of defeat attaches to every army that is retiring. And, for Charles’s part, he had now come to accept the condition of retreat as inevitable.

  “We shall never win,” he repeated to himself hopelessly. “They are too strong for us.”

  And what he was saying inside himself was not merely an isolated cry of despair in the mind of one man not born for war. It was the inarticulate expression of the whole spirit of the evacuating army.