A Question of Loyalties

by Allan Massie

  Nevertheless his wireless operator was able to establish where they might join up with whatever remained of the battalion, and the men fell into column of march, the Sergeant coaxing them along. Mutiny and desertion had been avoided. That was something.

  Five hours later they reached a village where the battalion was regrouping. The journey had been slow. They were hampered by the flock of refugees, in cars and motor-wagons, on bicycles, on foot and in farm-carts. Half a dozen of the troop fell out, stragglers who would throw off at least part of their uniform to mingle with the fleeing civilians. It was impossible to prevent it. He saw one man climb on to a wagon and sit down by a peasant girl who was carrying a black cockerel in her arms. He shouted at the soldier, who looked him straight in the eye, challenging him to act; and he dared not.

  He reported to the Colonel, relieved to find him at least still there. But he scarcely recognised him. The Colonel was famed for his elegance, disturbed only by bouts of malaria (for he had served in Indo-China) and not at all by his taste for opium. He had treated Lucien with respect, aware of his connections beyond the Army. Now Lucien found an old man suffering from lack of sleep, whose hands shook and whose voice had lost its customary precision. He even wondered if he might have had some sort of stroke.

  ‘We’re on the run.’

  That was how Colonel Vidal greeted him.

  ‘Aren’t we regrouping here?’

  ‘What is there to regroup? It’s a débâcle. No other word. Do you realise I have lost half my officers, and only one of them dead and one wounded? What sort of Army is that? And now I’m going to lose you.’

  ‘But I’ve just arrived.’

  ‘And must leave. Where’s that motorcyclist? He has a summons for you. You’re getting out. You’re climbing to the top, and will sit there like a monkey on a stick.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  But, instead of explaining, the Colonel put his head in his hands and began to sob.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE FAT GENERAL and the lean senior functionary from the Ministry of Defence complained about the absence of a dining car.

  ‘It’s outrageous when they knew that so much of the train was reserved for senior personnel.’

  ‘And why have we stopped here? We haven’t moved for a quarter of an hour.’

  ‘My adjutant confirmed that there would be a dining car.’

  ‘We have been so overwhelmed – no other word for it – at the Ministry’ – the initial capital sounded in his talk – ‘that it has been quite impossible to lunch for several days. Only a bowl of soup and a sandwich at my desk. Can you believe that? And now, when I was looking forward to, well, nothing excellent, you understand, for I am a reasonable man, but at least a chop and some fresh vegetables, what do we find? Not even bread and cheese.’

  ‘It’s sabotage, a deliberate attempt to impede the war effort. Brainwork is impossible without … and why don’t we move?’

  ‘It’s twenty minutes now …’

  ‘We’ll find the hotels in Tours closed, certainly the kitchens …’

  ‘I happen to know that the Reds are everywhere on the railways …’

  ‘My brother-in-law, who is a judge, tells me …’

  Lucien closed his eyes. He had had no sleep for three days. The orders to him had been changed and countermanded more than once. But, though he ached to sleep, when he closed his eyes Colonel Vidal’s yellow face, twisted in disbelief, rose before him – he heard him mutter again, ‘You’re flying to the top of the greasy pole, my boy’ – saw him twitch at the lapels of his jacket as if he could pull himself and his troops back into military order, and saw them fall away, leaving the jacket, which he hadn’t perhaps removed since the first day of the battle, looking only a little more creased.

  ‘My son was killed in the first hour of the battle,’ he heard Vidal say, ‘and they brought me news only yesterday, and my soldiers keep running, I’ve no time to mourn. Tell them what it’s like, Monsieur de Balafré, tell them what they have done to us.’

  But what in fact was it like, and what had been done to them? Lucien realised that either he did not know or had lost the power to command the words which might tell them. And the itch in his right foot was worse.

  A girl was driving red-and-white cows through a watery meadow beyond the train’s smeared and yellowing window. She lifted her hand as if to wave to them, and then stopped in mid-gesture; had it come to her that the train was carrying them to participate in what was left of the government of what was almost no longer France? Her hand dropped to her side, and the sun shone on her yellow headscarf. One of the cows broke away from the others and trundled in a clumsy confused gallop – like a French soldier, thought Lucien – towards the stream that ran under a row of elms. It stood knee-deep in the water, surprised as if it had never intended to arrive there. The girl laid down the pail she was carrying and, abandoning the other cows, which continued to stroll across the meadow in the direction of the train, turned back to chivvy her out of the water. But the cow just looked at her, uninterested. Its whole attitude said that it had had enough. Meanwhile the other cows lowered their heads and began to graze again. Without warning the train moved. The girl and the cows slipped out of sight. Lucien shut his eyes again. This time he slept.

  When he woke it was dark and there were no lights in the compartment. It was still warm, and a little orchestra of snores played around him. His eyes adjusted themselves and he realised that it was not quite dark, he could discern outlines. But he could see nothing beyond the train. The man on his left, who had said nothing since they drew out of Paris but whose disapproval of the General and the civil servant had been transmitted to Lucien, said:

  ‘Don’t ask me where we are. I’ve no idea.’

  He passed Lucien a bottle.

  ‘It’s rum, I warn you.’

  ‘Rum? I don’t think I’ve ever drunk rum.’

  But he took a mouthful.

  ‘Not bad, not bad at all,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Have some more. We’re all going to have to get used to things which we haven’t known before.’

  ‘Like that girl and the cow,’ Lucien said. ‘I wonder if she managed to persuade it out of the water.’

  ‘What girl and what cow?’

  ‘Oh, you didn’t notice? When we were stopped …’ And he explained. ‘It looked so obstinate standing there,’ he said, ‘I felt sorry for the girl.’

  ‘Have you been in battle?’

  ‘If it was a battle, yes.’

  ‘At any rate, if it wasn’t a battle, it was a disaster. It’s up to us all now to see what can be saved.’

  He closed his eyes, the train trundled through the night, at last it halted. Lucien rubbed his sleeve against the window. He couldn’t see whether they were in a station or in open country. He rolled down the window. Rooftops outlined themselves against the sky, blacker than its dull matt. There were no lights visible anywhere. He sank back on the cushions.

  After what seemed an eternity, the door of the compartment opened. A railway official stood there. He announced that they had arrived.

  ‘The train terminates here, gentlemen.’

  ‘There should be a car,’ Lucien said.

  ‘How would I know?’

  But there was a car, a big open staff-car waiting in the station yard. The chauffeur explained that he had been unwilling to leave it to search for them. ‘It was the choice of two evils,’ he kept saying. They climbed into the car. Without asking anyone, the general lit a cigar. They drove off into the night. Lucien experienced the powerlessness of a dream narrative.

  ‘The castle’s called Nitray,’ a young Lieutenant said. ‘The Marshal has retired hours ago, naturally. We expected you earlier. He has left instructions that he will see you at eight-twenty in the morning.’

  Lucien looked at his watch. It was five past four. The Lieutenant escorted him to a little room at the top of several flights of back stairs. One bed was already o
ccupied. Lucien asked to be called at seven-thirty. He took off his boots, tunic, trousers and shirt, and fell on the bed. Then he stirred again and removed his socks also.

  He woke to find the sun on his face and the other bed empty. His watch said five minutes past eight. He jumped to his feet, and had to steady himself, resting his hand on a table, as he experienced a wave of dizziness and nausea. There was some cold water in a jug and he shaved, wincing as the razor tore the beard from his face. It was eighteen minutes past when he left the room, and he had no idea where he was to report to the Marshal.

  ‘You’re two minutes late,’ Pétain said. ‘I expect my staff to keep military hours, with a soldier’s precision, Captain.’

  The Marshal was pink and gleaming as a strawberry ice. Sunlight danced from his buttons. The great white moustache fluffed out as he spoke. Lucien read benevolence and candour in his steady gaze.

  ‘Come, sit you down,’ Pétain said, ‘and tell me about the battle.’

  ‘There is nothing, Marshal, I can tell you in general terms, which you don’t already know, and as for my particular experience, it is perhaps too particular to have much value.’

  ‘Just so. All battles are the same in detail. Only this one is lost.’

  He paused. Lucien realised that he was expected to recount his impressions of the battle, nevertheless. He began to do so. After he had been speaking for some five minutes, he saw that the Marshal’s attention had wandered. He was gazing out of the window in a manner which suggested that he saw nothing. Parkland stretched away till the view was closed by dark green laurel bushes behind which rose beech trees.

  ‘I encountered a former protégé of mine yesterday,’ Pétain said. His voice seemed to come from a great distance, as if from the past. ‘You won’t have heard of him, but he’s a General now. I told him I didn’t congratulate him. “What good is rank in the midst of a defeat?” I said. He reminded me that I had myself received my first stars during the retreat in 1914. “The Marne followed a few days later,” he said. The Marne, yes, but history doesn’t repeat itself. It unfolds new shapes. It has its rhythms. I told him it wasn’t the same thing.’

  Then, with just the same gesture he had employed on that first occasion they met in his Paris office, he tinkled a little bell, relapsed into silence till an orderly arrived to receive his request for coffee, and again sat, as if carved in stone or at least posing for a sculptor, till the coffee was brought. Lucien couldn’t take his eyes off him; he was fascinated by the old man’s impassivity.

  ‘I need you,’ the Marshal said, ‘on my staff for the time being. I’ve arranged it all. That was a good article you wrote for me, you caught my style exactly. It was lapidary, classical. It represented me. Good. I want you to prepare a paper for the Prime Minister. It has to convince him. He’s not much of a man, little Reynaud, just a politician, but for the moment he’s the man we have to convince. It’s not only that we need an armistice, we have also to resist the British who are proposing that the French government abandon the French people and the soil of France and carry on the war beyond the seas. Bah, there is no France beyond the seas. You’ll find the right words, I’m confident of that. Churchill – I knew him in the last war, a man of no judgement – says England will fight on. I have my doubts. One other thing, we must accept suffering, you understand that? Can you say it well?’

  Lucien thought.

  ‘Perhaps we could say that our Renaissance will be the fruit of our suffering.’

  ‘Yes, that is true.’

  ‘For the government to leave France would be the line of least resistance …’

  ‘That’s true. Remember, France is its soil, and the most true Frenchmen our peasants who are attached to their land by bonds of history. But remember suffering. We must suffer in order to revive. First winter, then spring.’

  He stopped. Lucien felt the candid eyes searching his face. He felt the Marshal’s power and wisdom. Pétain stretched out his hand. For a moment it seemed to Lucien that he was going to receive the old man’s blessing, and there would be nothing presumptuous or blasphemous in the Marshal adopting the role of the priest.

  ‘Good,’ Pétain said. ‘We understand one another. Drink your coffee. Good. Ah, I see they’ve brought madeleines. I like these little cakes.’

  He took one and bit into it.

  ‘Don’t forget. The importance of suffering,’ he said.

  That was June 13. The next day the whole party of Pétain’s entourage left in motorcars for Bordeaux. They dined that evening, twelve of them at a big table, in the Hôtel Splendide, their quarters for the next fortnight. During the dinner a very tall Brigadier-General approached the table and shook Pétain by the hand. The Marshal proffered his hand in silence and barely looked up from his plate.

  That was the only time Lucien saw de Gaulle, and it was only his unusual appearance – ‘like a disconsolate stork’ – and Pétain’s evident indifference, which made the occasion remarkable; but six days later, when the armistice had been proposed, when Pétain was Prime Minister and de Gaulle had already made his first, subsequently famous, broadcast from London, he talked of him with his brother Armand.

  Armand had arrived in the city with de Gaulle, in whose regiment he had been serving. Lucien did not know that he was there, and was surprised to be summoned to the telephone and then hear his brother’s voice. They hadn’t met for almost a year. Armand explained that he wanted to see him – ‘urgently’ – but he didn’t wish to come to the Hôtel Splendide.

  ‘The fact was,’ he said later, ‘that I wasn’t at all sure of my status. I was really afraid of being arrested. It was known by then that de Gaulle was in London, and I thought it quite probable that I might be charged with having deserted my regiment, since it had only been with de Gaulle’s authority that I had come to Bordeaux. Of course everything was in a state of such confusion, and so many people who should in theory have remained with their regiments were to be found in the city, and indeed elsewhere all over France, that this may have been unlikely. I couldn’t tell, but I had nevertheless been very happy to slip out of my uniform and hoped that I would be taken by anyone who didn’t know me for a Bordelais businessman or civil servant. You can’t imagine the confusion there was.’

  So he persuaded Lucien to meet him in a café in a little sidestreet off the quays.

  ‘We were entering a time of little cafés in sidestreets, you know.’

  The brothers looked on each other as opposites; each saw the other as a sort of alien being who nevertheless compelled him to gaze into a mirror in astonishment. There were the simple questions: how could they have sprung from the same womb? From the same seed? Nurtured – to speak the language of 1940 – by, in and from the same soil? Lucien could not understand Armand’s talent for making money; it was the sort of thing he couldn’t himself conceive of. Money for him was simply what you drew from the bank and deposited there. The fertility of credit was a mystery to him, a veiled abstraction. But his own abstractions were equally veiled from Armand, who had an un-Latin distaste for general ideas. There was a Northern strain in the family – a grandmother from Lorraine – and perhaps that emerged in Armand, though it was Armand who had been educated entirely in the Midi.

  Yet, behind or below, or circling round, these differences, there was much, despite the gap in age, that was shared, so that now, when Armand saw Lucien push through the beaded curtain, and stand for a moment blind in the dark of the little café, he knew a tenderness which he could never have felt for anyone so different unless they had been fundamentally one. I often feel there is no relationship stranger than that of brothers; as an only child I am mystified by the tenderness which can join incompatibles, and which is manifested in the phrase one often hears: ‘Of course my brother is entirely different from me, but he’s a remarkable chap. I’m really proud of him, though we never see each other.’

  ‘And most of the time,’ Armand said to me, ‘we had no idea what to talk about.’

  Thi
s time of course it was different. There was too much to talk about, and it was the consciousness of this superfluity of experience and emotion to be exchanged which for a few minutes kept both silent. They fingered the glasses of armagnac which Armand had obtained and looked at each other as if they could wordlessly divine what had been endured in the weeks of war.

  Then Lucien said, ‘Do you know, I found myself drinking rum in a train the other day. A fellow whose name I don’t know gave it to me. Extraordinary stuff, never drunk it before. Rather liked it actually.’

  Armand was amazed by the abrupt jerky delivery; he wondered if his brother was drunk. That wasn’t possible, but it was surprising even to hear him talk about drink. He drank wine, of course, like anyone else, but he would no more talk about it than about water. Less, actually, for one of his favourite tags was to quote the Greek saying, ‘water is best’, lifting a glass of the stuff to prove it. He wasn’t drunk, however, only very tired. He told Armand he hadn’t enjoyed a night’s real sleep since April.

  ‘You have to remember,’ Armand said to me, ‘that in the early summer of 1940 all decisions were made by men who were exhausted, had gone without sleep. I made my own decisions, such as that which I now communicated to him, in the same state. Would I have determined to get to London to join de Gaulle if I hadn’t been so short of sleep?’

  ‘Pétain was the exception, surely,’ I said to him. ‘He slept enough, didn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, the Marshal, yes, but his waking life was a sort of dream, though I didn’t understand that at the time.’

  Lucien said: ‘Don’t you know he’s deranged?’

  He scarcely knew anything of de Gaulle, but he believed that. It was what was put about in the Marshal’s circle; deranged, consumed by vanity, his mind enflamed by chimeras.