by Allan Massie
The Sergeant who had welcomed him back to the regiment had said, ‘Well, sir, it’s got to be finished this time.’
He seemed to believe that, and he was a good man, admirable in his decent discipline, and one whom the boys respected. What were his thoughts as he composed himself to sleep? His breath had been heavy with wine when he told Lucien things had to be brought to a conclusion.
Just before leaving Paris, when he was already in uniform, he had bumped into Gaston Hunnot. Gaston looked him up and down. Lucien saw a sneer form.
‘So you think I am playing at war, Gaston?’
‘The whole of France is playing at war, and each of us wishes for a different conclusion.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I mean that primarily each of us sees this war as a means of resolving personal difficulties. That is France today, a mere collection of personalities.’
As he spoke, he tapped the lamp-post with his cane. Lucien remembered that Gaston’s newspaper had been closed down, as a result, it was thought, of an article which Aragon had written welcoming the Nazi-Soviet pact as offering the hope of European peace.
‘And how will you occupy the war, Gaston?’
‘I am writing a journal.’
‘And isn’t that somewhat egotistic?’
‘No egotism is without value, so long as it is sincere. Then it can also be of enduring interest.’
Lucien was astonished to realise that Gaston welcomed the outbreak of hostilities simply because it heightened his own awareness of his own feelings. Young boys would be killed so that Hunnot could observe his indifference to their deaths as a mark of his own superiority. He watched him limp away, more heavily than he used to: to divert any suggestion that he too should have been recalled to the colours?
But of course Hunnot was too old. Lucien was indeed too old himself. It had required persistence and the use of such influence as he had to bring him to this point where he lay, on a fine autumn afternoon, in front of the French lines watching the larks in the sky and a magpie swoop from a nearby copse.
Yet this ground too had been stained with blood – Hunnot’s also, he must not forget that – and would be again.
Waiting. He had spent all his life waiting.
O Seigneur! J’ai véçu puissant et solitaire.
Laissez-moi m’endormir du sommeil de la terre..!
It distressed him that he could find no language in which to speak to the private soldiers. He wanted them to know that he shared their fear of the future, their longing to be back home with their families – he whose family had torn itself from him – that he sympathised with their knowledge that reality consisted of the tram-ride to work in the morning, the game of cards in the café, the Sunday afternoons strolling hand-in-hand with their girls along the riverbank. And all he could do was comment on their drill and turn-out. He felt so much for them, and they saw him as almost an alien, someone who kept them up to the mark, who insisted that they paid attention to matters that were quite meaningless to them.
Not that it was much better as far as his fellow-officers were concerned.
After all, to talk of a death-wish, still more to fear that such possessed the nation, was merely fashionable nonsense.
Was a single magpie unlucky? He couldn’t even remember that.
Weeks of waiting, of performing necessary tasks which were all part of preparation for the day when the waiting would end, when the grey uniforms would swarm towards them, to batter themselves against the impregnable fortress of their lines of defence.
‘Of course they won’t attack,’ Major Delibes was accustomed to say, twirling his glass of Calvados. ‘It would be madness. And we are not going to because our strategy is to remain on the defensive. So we have evolved the perfect strategy to make war obsolete: we refuse to move and they dare not. Take it from me, chaps, this joke-war will continue until …’
‘Until what?’ little Arquier, who admired Delibes, could be counted on to ask.
‘Until we have to go home to Normandy to replenish our stock of Calvados,’ someone said.
This was a new Lieutenant who had just joined them and whose name Lucien did not yet know. His intervention was thought presumptuous. Delibes smiled at him.
‘It’s easy to see, young fellow, that you don’t know much about these things. I don’t imagine you even understand what we are doing here.’
‘No, tell me,’ the Lieutenant said.
‘We are performing a comedy. Hitler has no reason to wish to fight France, and, believe me, he has too much sense to think of doing so. That is why there is no action on the western front, unlike 1914. No, no, laddie, all his ambitions are in the east. Which is just as well, let me tell you, because if he knew how those scoundrels of Jewish-Socialist politicians had neglected the Army, he would be here tomorrow.’
‘But I thought,’ the Lieutenant said, ‘that you had given it as your opinion that we would throw the Germans back, if they chose to attack.’ He spoke in a modest, enquiring tone.
‘Precisely.’
‘Despite the way the politicians have neglected the Army?’
‘Despite that, young man, I am a soldier of France, and I understand the spirit of France. It is indomitable. We shall triumph, if we have to.’
‘If? Do you mean that you really think it will not come to a battle?’
‘Why should it? Who wants this war? Not France, not Hitler. Only Jewish politicians, and those who have sentimental ideas about Poland, ideas which in this context of our present difficulties amount, in my opinion, to treason.’
Delibes seized the bottle of Calvados by the neck, almost as if it might have been a Jewish politician whom he wished to strangle, and tilted it towards his glass.
‘No, no, young man,’ he said, ‘you have no need to be afraid. Things will arrange themselves, never fear.’
Hearing this officer, Lucien understood that the war would be lost. He had already seen the negligent manner in which Delibes supervised his men’s training.
Later that night he sought out the young Lieutenant and tried to assure him that not all French officers were like Major Delibes.
‘Of course I understand that, sir. Nevertheless I am afraid there are a good many who think like him.’
‘Naturally,’ Lucien said, ‘nobody of sense wants war. That doesn’t mean however that …’
He stopped, his fluency deserting him. He was unable to pretend to the young man that he was confident of victory.
‘You’re almost young enough to be my son,’ he said. ‘Let’s just say it will be a long war in the course of which we shall doubtless suffer reverses before victory.’
‘What I’m afraid of,’ the Lieutenant said, ‘is that we should have acted sooner. It seems to me that we are in danger of being left alone at the mercy of the enemy.’
They stepped outside. It had started to freeze. There was silence under a white moon. A windless night in which they could have been two men in a desert landscape.
‘It will be a cold winter and a long one,’ Lucien said. ‘All we can do is whatever duty demands of us.’
It seemed strange to him to speak of duty after hearing Delibes. Fortunately the young Lieutenant appeared to find it natural enough.
‘I find myself praying,’ he said. ‘I never thought I would do that. I was quite convinced that I had put aside any belief in God. It distressed my poor mother. And now …’
‘This sky, this situation … there are moments in life which must convince us that God exists.’
‘Do you think they feel like that on the other side?’
‘Many of them do, Lieutenant,’ Lucien said, thinking of Rupert.
Lucien knew that he was an object of interest and suspicion to his fellow-officers. Most were solid professional soldiers who had spent the last ten or fifteen or twenty years in provincial barracks. Only the Colonel was a veteran of the last war. None of the others had seen active service even in the colonies. They were puzzle
d by the determination Lucien had had to employ to return to the Army. Those who were reservists, recalled from their civilian occupations, were mostly resentful that he had chosen a course to which they had themselves reluctantly submitted. Then he lacked the easy camaraderie which could make life there tolerable. They thought him a snob and a prig. When he received a letter from the Madrid Embassy, where the Marshal was Ambassador, franked with the Marshal’s own stamp, some were impressed, but more wondered if he was not in some sense a spy who would pass on reports about them to higher authority. Even if he wasn’t a spy, he was clearly a pet of the War Office. A few however, Delibes among them, now began to try to ingratiate themselves with him, as someone who might advance their career. He disliked them for this.
All in all it made for a difficult atmosphere. The weather too turned bitterly cold. The troops were bored and indifferent to their duties. Morale was low. Lucien shared in the general mood of despondency.
The Marshal’s letter did nothing to raise his spirits. Though reticent in speech, he was indiscreet in correspondence. He told Lucien that while he believed he was doing a useful job in Spain himself – it was necessary to convince Franco that France’s struggle was ‘a continuation of the Nationalist cause in the Civil War’ – he was gloomy about the state of affairs in Paris. There was ‘poor organisation’ at the Ministry of War: ‘Indeed, my friend, I must call it by the right name, which is anarchy. It does not surprise me. At my age few things do. The truth is that there is a notable lack of resolution in this Government, which prefers words to actions. Life in France has been too easy-going. The spirit of sacrifice is missing. To stimulate energy, which is sadly absent, there is nothing like suffering. And I fear we shall soon discover this.’
The old man’s letters might have dismayed Lucien more, but for two things. The first was that he found himself in agreement with the Marshal’s criticisms, and indeed fed them by relaying to him his own appreciation of the mood in the Army. (To this extent those of his brother officers who thought him a spy were quite correct.) Second, the Marshal hinted that he expected that he would be recalled from Madrid, ‘sometime in the spring’ to take part in war planning, ‘though I shall refuse to have anything to do with cabinets of politicians whose influence has been so disastrous’. When that happened he would wish to make use of Lucien. ‘Your lucidity, patriotism and intelligence are just what I need.’ He added that while he understood Lucien’s wish to take ‘a direct, personal, manly and honourable’ (no shortage of the despised adjectives there) part in the war, he must nevertheless ‘nerve’ himself to understand that the hour would arrive when he could serve France better, according to his special gifts, in another capacity. ‘There are many brave officers, few wise counsellors.’
Lucien had become friendly with the young Lieutenant who had argued with Delibes. His name was Alain Querouaille, and he was Breton, with the reddish hair and pale skin often found there. For Lucien his enthusiasm was invigorating. He was intelligent too, high-spirited; he confessed that he would have chosen to be an actor, but his mother, to whom he was devoted, was horrified by the suggestion.
‘All the same,’ he said, ‘I intend to write plays, indeed I have had one performed, but only at a local festival, you understand.’
Despite his high spirits, Alain was pessimistic when they talked of the forthcoming battle.
‘It’s all very well for a fat imbecile like Delibes to talk about spirit, but the only spirit I connect with him is the Calvados he swigs. And look at the men. They are all under-trained and they don’t trust their officers. Half of them don’t even think we should be fighting – not when the Soviet Union is Germany’s ally.’
‘Not as many as half,’ Lucien said. ‘Only a few.’
‘I would say half. We have the wrong Army for the wrong war, I’m sure of that.’
‘We have perhaps no choice but to wait on the defensive. That is the penalty of democracy.’
‘And half the officers wouldn’t be unhappy to see a German victory.’
‘Again surely not as many as half.’
Their arguments were circular, as men’s usually are in such circumstances when one day repeats another.
Alain said: ‘We are preparing to fight the last war, and I don’t think the Germans are.’
Lucien argued against him, but he suspected the boy might be right. He was always ready to believe anyone younger than himself. Besides, there was something of Rupert in his new friend, though Alain’s features were more fine-drawn and nervous.
‘Don’t you sense,’ Alain said, ‘a simmering undercurrent of self-hate in our Army. There are a good many officers who will be lucky not to receive a bullet in the back if they lead an advance. Perhaps that accounts for our Maginot-Line mentality.’
Lucien would have liked to disbelieve him.
He admired the boy’s tact. Alain often talked about his own family, never asked about his. His grandfather had been a sea-captain, drowned somewhere in the Pacific. His mother had conceived a hatred of the sea.
‘It’s a tradition in my mother’s family, but one we could not follow. Anyway, we have perhaps the wrong temperament, I don’t know.’
There were two brothers and a sister. His elder brother was a notary in Rennes, the second a schoolteacher, while his sister Anne had joined the administrative branch of the Ministry of Education.
‘We are a very respectable family,’ he said.
He passed Lucien a photograph.
‘I took that last Christmas.’
He sighed.
‘I wonder if we shall ever have another Christmas all together. Don’t you think my mother has a remarkable face?’
Lucien nodded. He almost said, ‘It’s for mothers like yours that we are fighting,’ but it would have been absurd and sentimental. It was a fifteenth-century face, from a stained-glass window. Loving and passive. All he could do was nod.
‘Hervé is a bit of a fanatic.’
Alain indicated the thin-faced boy with a lock of dark hair falling over his left eye. He was fondling the ears of the spaniel which sat between his legs looking up at his face with an expression of adoration.
‘Yes, he’s a Breton nationalist. He’s even taught himself Breton. We’re all a bit worried about Hervé.’
But it was the girl who held Lucien’s gaze. He couldn’t tell why. She was not especially beautiful, though that might be the result of the quality of the photograph. But there was a promise of serenity there. What had he said to Rupert: ‘It’s my misfortune to have fallen in love with a woman who is not my type’?
‘What colour are her eyes?’
‘What colour are my sister’s eyes? What an extraordinary question. They’re blue or I think they are.’
‘She has … an uncommon look to her.’
‘She’s an uncommon girl.’
He took back the photograph and replaced it in his wallet.
‘You must think me an awful fool,’ Alain said, ‘pressing photographs of my family on you, just like a little private soldier. But we are very close.’
‘Of course I don’t think you a fool. I’m honoured. But you are quite right. People are doing just this all along the line. In the end, it’s hard to distinguish between love of family and love of country.’
‘I suppose one’s family is a microcosm of the country.’
‘Well, certainly,’ said Lucien, the man who had lost his family, ‘it’s for the family that most men will fight.’
These months were a kind of limbo for him. He went through the motions of being a serving officer with such diligence as he could muster. He was far too proud not to do his work efficiently, but he knew that he had made a mistake in insisting on returning to the Army. He couldn’t believe either that he might make a useful contribution to the war effort there, or indeed in the war effort itself. His diaries are full of doubts. Even the Colonel, whom he had admired at first, proved to be ‘obstinate and old-fashioned to the point of imbecility. It is like serving in th
e Royal Army of 1788.’
In February he went to Paris on leave. The atmosphere of the city astonished him. At first he told himself it was because he had forgotten the sound of conversation, which was unfair to young Alain. But it wasn’t that. It was rather that Parisians seemed to him to have become already indifferent to the war. It was a joke-war in which nothing was happening, and soon a peace would be agreed.
‘After all,’ a woman said to him, ‘it was only about Poland, wasn’t it, and now that Poland has been gobbled up by the Germans and the Bolsheviks, there seems little reason to continue to pretend that we have anything to fight about.’
She waved a cigarette-holder in his face, and he remembered from that gesture that she had been a friend always ready to encourage Polly in some frivolity.
When he met Marcel Pougier, he found him only able to speak of a young actor he had seen in a play.
‘What I’m terrified of is that he will be called up. It wouldn’t suit him at all.’
Lucien wondered how he had escaped call-up already.
He walked by the Seine. The hard frost held the sky motionless, blue-grey and shiny like a suit of armour. Birds huddled black on the black branches. Even the chestnut-sellers, round their braziers, stamped their feet to keep warm. The smell of the roasting chestnuts hung in the air. A hearse pulled by four black horses passed, its driver muffled to the ears. Sheets of ice had formed round the parapets of the bridges, supporting seabirds the colour of fog. Every now and then came an echoing creak as a barge broke through the ice. As night approached, the horns of the barges sounded melancholy as funeral music and the wretched tramps who slept under the bridges made their round of the dustbins collecting scraps of food and discarded newspapers with which to cover themselves.
But in the brasseries and cafés things were different. In the first weeks of the war, when he was last in Paris, many had been closed. Now their proprietors had accommodated themselves to the blackout. In the evening, tarts, assembling at street corners, swung gasmasks in their hands. There was a note of gaiety there once you were past the misted glass doors. Inside the babble of conversation rose: ‘like incense’ he said to himself. ‘We talk, therefore we are.’ In the Brasserie Lipp he watched men gobble sausages and fried potatoes as if their meal represented their last tomorrow. And yet, there, voice after voice asserted that of course the Germans would never come. ‘But if they do,’ he heard a stout red-cheeked man with stiff moustaches shout, ‘it won’t be a moment too soon to rid us of these damned Jews.’ Was he oblivious of a party of very obvious Jews eating at the next table but one, or were his remarks directed particularly at them?
