by Allan Massie
Moreover, it is not only History that acts on us. Sartre’s drama which tells us that Hell is other people is too glib. The fact is that life here is other people too. If Lucien had not been posted, by the whim of a superior, to Berlin, if he had not crouched in the butts watching for the geese to fly across the Pomeranian marches, if he had not sniffed the grey wind in the east, would his journey from Bordeaux in 1940 have taken him to London, not Vichy? And would he, in any case, have acted differently if Rupert had not said to him in Zermatt that the true war was between decency and indecency, adding that if that ass Chamberlain had not flown to Munich, his friends in the Army would have arrested Hitler?
There are so many ways of interpreting every decision, even while one realises that the very word ‘decision’ is itself misleading, suggesting as it does a degree of consciousness which is very often not there at all. I am tormented by the thought of inextricable triangles: Rupert, Lucien, Polly; Germany, France, Britain; love, hate, fear; Christian, pagan, Jews; good, evil, indifference; reality, unreality, surreality – each of these groupings resembles the Trinity, three in one and one in three. Even the least probable of them. My poor father wrote once: ‘The reason the Jew is hated is that he has broken into the Christian world, and returned it to paganism and the worship of the dead goddess, Moneta. In retaliation, especially in Germany, many born Christians have abandoned their faith and themselves reverted to the vile enthusiasm of paganism. Hitler hates the Jews because this hatred justifies his own killing of Christ in himself.’
So where, in this maelstrom, can responsibility lie? We are responsible for actions performed in response to circumstances for which we are not responsible.
Everything I have written about Lucien, Hugh, is likely to mislead you precisely because I have written about a single man. Only a fool however can pretend to singularity, though only a fool denies it. This is the bottom line: our actions are compelled by circumstances and yet we choose to commit them. Lucien could not have avoided following Pétain and committing himself to Vichy, and yet can be seen to have neglected the chance he was offered to avoid doing so. But Lucien cannot be understood if we try only to understand Lucien.
This is one lie of biography. It separates the individual from his circumstances, and grants him an individuality he did not possess. But there is a second lie, characteristic of political biography, and this eliminates the subject of the biography, so that the book becomes merely a record of his words and acts. Such biography cannot accommodate that moment when Lucien looked down from his terrace and saw the girl’s legs close on the boy’s hand. It cannot do so because moments like this which are deeply moving are nevertheless insignificant. And if I went on to describe how the boy was promoted when the Service d’Ordre Légionnaire was converted into the Milice, the secret police of Vichy, the next year, of how he was guilty of ‘atrocities’ against the Resistance, and then shot during the épuration, such information could not fail to affect one’s interpretation of that simple and double manifestation of desire which made Lucien aware that it was spring, as he looked down from his terrace, and made him wonder if he himself would feel another spring.
Let me sketch out three other wars to bring Lucien into focus. If I was an artist, Hugh, I would have contrived to entwine these stories with Lucien’s and, if I was writing a novel – and we toyed with making his story a novel – I would devise a cunning plot which brought them together in less arbitrary and more consequential fashion. But that is not how things happen. One life touches another only from time to time – even the girl in the café released the boy’s hand, though they were frozen into eternal immobility in Lucien’s mind. I have invented one story for him, and let us say she tried to pretend later she had never known a boy who committed atrocities against those he was programmed to consider traitors, atrocities, however, which in another interpretation were expressions of self-hatred rather than hatred directed outward.
The artist labours to bring these things together, to impose a pattern which he pretends he has extracted; but life forces them apart.
So, take Rupert. We left him in Zermatt where in fact he stood on the platform of the little station watching the train bear Lucien, Polly and happiness away. He travelled from Zermatt to Geneva, and stayed there, in this same Hôtel des Bergues, throughout the spring of 1939. He mixed, carelessly, with refugees from Hitler’s tyranny, who found him unsympathetic and were afraid that he might be a spy. He considered further and permanent emigration, as he had once thought of going to China. Yet, in May, he returned to Germany, certain that war would break out in the autumn. ‘I could not oppose Hitler unless I also fought for Germany,’ he wrote. ‘I can divorce Germany from Hitler but it is impossible to divorce myself from Germany. The doctrine “my country right or wrong” is too facile. It is not that consideration which moves me. With memories however of the suffering which defeat in war makes inevitable, I cannot work for the defeat of my country in order to be able to preserve my view of myself as a moral being.’
It’s absurd, isn’t it, to consider someone who chose – that lying word again – to return to fight for Hitler’s Germany, which was only his own Germany in as much as he and Hitler partook of the same Germany – to consider such a man ‘a moral being’. Yet he had no doubt: he would have been ashamed to have taken any other course. So he returned, committing himself to loyal opposition, disloyal support.
In June 1941 he found himself fighting on the eastern front. That felt right; he was enacting, or re-enacting, the historic mission of his family. He was decorated in the great advance, then wounded, and sent back, with his Iron Cross, to convalesce at his mother’s house in Saxony. The war was still going well, which meant that Germany was going badly. Defeat was necessary to dislodge Hitler, but not such defeat as would destroy Germany. He spent the winter of ’41–’42 reading Hegel, Goethe (Faust – what else?), Thucydides and Homer. In the evening he and his mother played Wagner on the gramophone.
‘How can Hitler take comfort from this,’ he asked, ‘seeing that the message of The Ring is that even the gods cannot do wrong, commit violence, with impunity?’
In the short hours of daylight, he shot duck. They had devised a sling for him which let him use a gun despite his shattered left arm. He was assailed by dreams of bright heroism, wrote long letters to Lucien which he did not dare to send. In the spring he travelled to Berlin, and consulted with his well-born friends. They agreed that the time was not yet ripe to make a move. He received a posting, as a species of military attaché, to Paris. It was agreed with his friends he should sound out elements in the Vichy government, men who might be ready to act as intermediaries with the British and Americans, so that peace might be negotiated, when they had ‘dealt with’ Hitler. There were delays. He arrived in Paris on the first day of the Battle of Stalingrad.
He had written to Lucien announcing his arrival, and was disappointed to find no message awaiting him. But for a few days the pleasure of being back in Paris, even the mean grey Paris of wartime, was enough to raise his spirits. Yet he soon started feeling oppressed; relations were askew. He had always been accustomed to think of France as condescending; he couldn’t adjust to the mixture of subservience and resentment he encountered. In the east there was no difficulty in being a member of the master race, his family had always been conquerors there. It was different in France: he felt inferior to those who refused to accept his superiority, superior only to those who toadied to him. The French people with whom he wanted to speak were those who would have nothing to do with him. It seemed in a curious fashion that this included Lucien, even though he was a member of the government that was allied to his: which of course he detested.
One afternoon he found himself in the street which had housed the office of Lucien’s magazine. To his surprise the plate announcing its presence was still there, though requiring to be polished. He mounted the stairs, conscious, as he already to his irritation found himself whenever he ventured off approved paths, of a cert
ain tremor: the result of an awareness that he offered a tempting target.
He pushed open the door at the head of the stairs. It led into a passage blocked off by another door, the upper half of which was made of misty glass. He could see two shapes through the glass, and heard voices. The door was not quite shut. They were arguing.
‘And if I denounce you …’
‘You will compromise Lucien. Is that what you wish?’
It was a woman’s voice, and it trembled. Rupert hesitated.
‘I suppose it is,’ the woman continued. ‘You will do anything to destroy him. You cannot tolerate the fact of his moral superiority.’
‘The moral superiority of a collaborator,’ the man said. ‘Yes, indeed, you have not lost your capacity to speak the unthinkable, Mathilde. You were always a fool.’
‘And you a venomous toad, Philippe.’
Rupert pushed the door open. They fell silent on seeing a German officer. The man snatched up a briefcase from the table. He was tall and thin with a little black moustache; he could hardly have looked less like a toad. A rat, perhaps, Rupert thought.
Rupert was embarrassed by the silence. For a moment, hoping to find Lucien there, he had forgotten his uniform. And it was an absurd hope. He didn’t know what to say. The silence alarmed the man, who pushed past him and galloped down the stairs. Rupert listened to the descending feet. The girl watched him. She was waiting for the sound of a shot or at least an arrest.
‘May I sit down?’ he said.
‘Who are you?’
There was silence on the stairs now. It seemed to creep into the room which was lit in the dying afternoon by a single weak bulb hanging on a ragged cord from the ceiling. He moved a brimming ash-tray from the table, flicked his handkerchief to blow away the dust and rested his elbow there.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I seem to have alarmed your friend.’
‘No friend.’
‘I didn’t intend to. I called here quite by chance. I am myself an old friend of Lucien de Balafré, I recognised the name of his magazine on the brass plate, and called – absurdly, I understand that, but then I find, don’t you, that so many of our actions are absurd – on the mere chance that someone here might know where he was.’
‘He’s in Vichy. I would have thought you would know that.’
‘Oh, of course, that was always likely. I merely hoped. You must understand that I am here in no official capacity.’
He wanted to put her at ease. Perhaps she was the kind of girl who was never that. Now she looked stricken. She was tall, beaky, perhaps a little drunk; her breath carried a whiff of wine to him. It was a very small room, and musty, as if the air had been held in it a long time. It might even be pre-war air. There were cobwebs, big ones, across the window; he could see into another room which was quite dark.
It was not surprising that Mathilde Dournier was perturbed by the arrival of a German officer. Somehow his claim to be a friend of Lucien’s made him more sinister. She had always been ready to distrust friendliness. But it was a bad moment.
Mathilde’s war had been quiescent. That accorded with her temperament, with her suspicion of commitment. She had tried to live as if it wasn’t happening. Politics were for men. Politics were violent. That was why they ended in war. She suspected that all men were invigorated and excited by war. Even perhaps Lucien, who was the best man she knew. As for her, she loathed it so much that she would have preferred to wipe it off her consciousness. In the end that wasn’t possible. She found that she couldn’t write poetry. She was working in a shop again, but that wasn’t the reason. It wasn’t because of fatigue and malnutrition that her Muse had fled. She put that phrase in italics, to excuse herself, even while the consciousness that it had come into her mind sharpened her self-contempt. She was sure that Lucien was wrong in what he was doing, but never doubted his good intentions. Indeed his mistaken loyalties only strengthened hers to him.
She could deny herself much, but not pity. In the end pity compelled her to action. She had formed the habit of coming to the office one day a week, choosing for some obscure motive of caution to vary the day, her ostensible purpose in coming being to keep the magazine ticking over, even though it was in abeyance. A few forlorn hopeful manuscripts still arrived; she dealt with them, mustering sympathy, dispensing judgement. That was her duty. Attendance at the office was also her pleasure, it was the only service she could perform for Lucien. It represented, in her mind, the same sort of hope she felt every month when she caught sight of the thin slice of new moon: an assurance that not everything was out of order. Someday Lucien would be back, someday real life would be resumed. She told herself the thought was madness. What was happening around was only too horribly real. But she attended the office in order to deny that reality, to impose a superior reality upon it.
Rupert said: ‘I was under the impression that Lucien’s magazine had ceased publication.’
‘It’s been suspended.’
‘Not by us, I would hope.’
‘No, by Lucien himself. By the war. This beastly war.’
‘But you still come here to..?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘manuscripts still arrive, you see. People who used to read it, or used to contribute, don’t always know that … anyway, they hope. That’s why I come, to deal with these things.’
‘To put an end to their hope.’
‘Perhaps.’
But that wasn’t the only reason, now. They had in the back room a duplicating machine. Mathilde had always disliked it – she was unhandy and couldn’t operate the machine without getting her fingers inky – and had almost forgotten its existence. Then a young man, a poet who had had a few verses published in the magazine, asked her if she would run off a sequence of little poems he had written. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘if I like them.’ That was the start. There was nothing political, nothing subversive about it. But the young man had friends, and it was difficult to draw a line between what was political and what wasn’t. Soon, or rather gradually, she was committed. Mathilde’s duplicating machine became a tool of the Resistance. There was no enthusiasm on her part: she disliked most of those she served, and, though it made her angry, and grieved her, to see the poverty and wretchedness of old women and children in the streets, that seemed to her the consequence of war as much as the Occupation. Besides, her loyalty remained with Lucien, and she resented being used by those on the other side. For all that, she continued the work. Without interest in politics, hating and scorning the war, she still didn’t believe that the Occupation would last. It occurred to her that what she was doing might serve Lucien. If the time came, she would swear he had encouraged her. In this way she appeased her disturbed loyalty.
They had never been raided. She couldn’t understand why, for she took few precautions, not knowing how she should set about doing so. It was perhaps the very blatancy of her lack of method which protected her; and the fact that the magazine had been closed at the beginning of the war, and that Lucien was a Vichy Minister, and so above suspicion. As the stridency of those Parisian Fascists who regarded Vichy as insufficiently committed to the cause of a German victory grew in volume till it penetrated even her defences, she began to believe in the virtue of what she was doing. And, believing that, she experienced fear for the first time. So it was natural that the arrival of a German officer perturbed her. She must be under investigation. She must have been denounced.
He told her his name. She recognised it, which surprised her. Lucien had indeed mentioned him. She had even been jealous, she remembered, because he seemed to admire him so.
‘You were with him in Zermatt,’ she said, ‘when his wife left him.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was a tragedy for him.’
‘But they weren’t suited, I think.’
‘Who’s to say? They loved each other, I know that. I can say that with truth and certainty because I loved both myself.’
‘She wasn’t worthy of him, she couldn’t share his interests.’
‘Don’t you think he was perhaps happier that way?’
It was absurd that they were talking together as if they were friends, and a moment ago her heart had stopped when Philippe Torrance had threatened to denounce her and the German officer had entered.
‘Who was that man who was here when I arrived?’ he asked.
‘Just a contributor, just a would-be contributor. I don’t know …’
‘It was such a good magazine, you have no idea what it meant to me to be able to receive it in Berlin. Lucien discovered his true métier with it, and now … the war. It destroys everything.’
‘He was an editor of genius. He is. He …’
‘You wrote for it yourself ..?’
‘Yes.’ She looked away. ‘Only a few poems, nothing much.’
‘A few poems: Will you tell me your name?’
‘Mathilde Dournier …’ she said, and held her breath.
‘But I remember them. They were charming. You can’t think what a pleasure it is to me. To meet you, I mean. It’s like a moment of real life in this ghastly charade we are playing.’
To her surprise, she found herself liking him. Charade – the word expressed what she would have liked to be able still to believe; there was a scornful innocence to it. She glanced at his left arm and the shattered hand.
‘Is that part of the charade?’ she asked.
He smiled.
‘The Russian front?’
‘Yes. Don’t let’s talk about the war. Let’s talk of Lucien or of poetry.’
In a little, he said: ‘I wonder, I don’t know how you feel about such things, but would you like to have dinner with me?’
‘Dinner?’
‘Yes. Don’t feel obliged. I will understand if you feel it would compromise you, if you’d rather not …’
