by Allan Massie
But his voice trembled. The truth was that in these desperate November days the Marshal changed his mind every five minutes. He had lost the constancy which had been his strength, and, having lost that, was only a poor bewildered old man.
Yet he clung to his duty and to his vision of himself as the saviour of France.
‘Laval despises me. He rejects me. Nevertheless he knows he can’t do without me. As I said to him and the German Ambassador, “My presence is necessary to you. If I detach myself, there’ll be anarchy.”’
On the 16th, Laval confronted him with the German demand that France should declare war. Pétain scratched his head.
‘You wouldn’t make that sort of demand if you were a soldier,’ he said. ‘It’s always you civilians who want to rush into war. You’re behaving like a politician, like Reynaud. Besides, I’m exhausted. I’ve had enough. I’d like to retire.’
‘I’m weary too, Marshal,’ Laval said. ‘You seem to forget I have spent several hours recently listening to Hitler. That’s fatiguing, I assure you. But we can’t retire. France still needs you, if only as a symbol.’
‘What did he mean,’ Pétain said to me, ‘“if only as a symbol”? That’s not the way France needs me. On the other hand, since I can’t have my own way, perhaps I should abdicate, and remain only as Head of State without immediate responsibility. That way … of course Laval and I understand each other, we’re both peasants, you know. And, ultimately, we are both working for the same end.’
Throughout the crisis I was amazed by the Marshal’s resilience. It is as if he sinks back into the soil from time to time only to gather his strength again.
‘Do you know what Abetz said of me?’ A shy smile crossed his face. ‘He said I was as troublesome as I was indispensable. That’s just how I like it. “We can’t do anything with him,” he said. “We can’t do anything without him.” You see I can still resist. I am France, and I am a disagreeable reality that whoever wins this war will have to confront somehow. Meanwhile, I don’t mind giving Laval his head for a little.’
On the 19th they commanded him to broadcast again. ‘Write the speech,’ he said to me. ‘It doesn’t matter what you say because at the moment we’ve got to say what they tell us to. It’s a speech that won’t be supplemented by an official order. So it means nothing.’
‘In the dream world of nightmare in which we live, in which terrifying voices howl by night, the Marshal still moves with more serenity than any of us.’
So I wrote in my diary of 20 November.
On the 26th the Germans moved to seize the French fleet at Toulon. According to orders already given, the Admiral in command had the ships scuttled. The news was given to the Marshal when he woke an hour later.
‘It had to be done,’ he said.
Several of us pressed him to reconsider his intention to remain in France. We urged that this evidence of German ill-faith annulled all contracts and made it impossible for him to stay.
‘“Contracts, impossible”, I don’t like these words.’ He pulled at his tunic. I noticed that his nails are still beautifully manicured. ‘My poor children,’ he said. ‘How can I run away? I gave my word to the French people that I would stay with them. I’m not going to abandon them now when things are again as bad as they were in 1940, or even worse. I know you are concerned about my reputation. I’m a proud man and care for it myself. However, there it is. My glory may be tarnished, but I won’t abandon the poor people. I’ll share their sufferings as Christ was made flesh to share mankind’s. In any case I’ll follow the path of duty, though it’s by no means the easiest one. For me, the easiest path would be to leave.’
He really believes that, though Anne assures me it’s not true.
‘It’s easier for him to stay, don’t you see? At least here he knows which part he must play. It would be a new role in a new comedy in North Africa, and that’s too much for him at his age. No, I don’t blame him.’
Sometimes I think that Anne, who has never spoken a word to the Marshal, has come to understand him better than I.
Then, on 29 November, Hitler announced that he was going to disband the French Army. This, I said to myself, is the final revenge for 1918. The Marshal fingered his moustache.
‘Maybe it’s for the best,’ he said. ‘It certainly removes one problem. We no longer have soldiers to command. I shall therefore accede, under protest, and assure Hitler of our continuing loyalty. What else can I do?’
He required one further service of me. This was to prepare a draft of the broadcast which he intended to give at Christmas.
‘You’ll remind them that I have kept my promise,’ he said. ‘That’s the main thing. And not too many adjectives, remember. Tell them we must be dignified in sorrow. That expresses the right mood.’
So I wrote: ‘At this hour when it seems that the earth is falling away below our feet, raise your eyes to the sky: you will find in the celestial majesty of the heavens reassurance of the eternity of light, and you will know how to place your hopes where they belong.’
In the broadcast version, the words ‘enough stars so as not to doubt the eternity of light’ were substituted, and some said that this was intended as a reference to the American flag. I do not know whether this was true or whether the Marshal merely preferred the homely stars to my more ornate ‘in the celestial majesty of the heavens’. Perhaps my phrase was ill-chosen; after all, in 1940 Laval had told the Marshal that he now possessed more power than the Sun-King himself.
I say I do not know, for that draft was the last service I have been able to perform on behalf of the Marshal. On 31 December I resigned my portfolio and retired to the Château de l’Haye. The Marshal had been rendered impotent, and I could not believe that I could honourably perform any useful service to what remained of the French State. Perhaps this was a cowardly decision.
November 1942 was a month of decisive disaster. When it began, France still had a large area of metropolitan territory free of Axis troops, an empire, an Army and Air Force, and a fleet. By the end of the month we had none of these things. Everything had changed. The Marshal had surrendered what remained of his authority to Monsieur Laval, who, poor man, was henceforth doomed to twist and turn, like a rat in a shrinking trap.
As for me, as for me … it is now spring, and the question remains open. The Resistance is stirring even in Provence. I sit, read and write. Only the landscape comforts me. The landscape and Anne’s love.
Let me put it on record that, but for her, I might have shot myself.
No, that’s romantic rhetoric, such as I have always despised.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I HAVE ENGLISH friends who love Provence and have never looked at the country. They know it only in summer, when it basks in the sun like a cat, and the fruit ripens. For them Provence is benign, a land of fresh mornings and long hot afternoons, of flowers, fruit and fecundity. They haven’t observed how harsh and jagged are its rocks, how thin the soil, how the trees are bent by the icy wind that for five months in the year blows from the high Alps. They take the summer as a right, when it is only a reward or recompense.
That January the wind blew without stopping, day after day, rattling the olive trees; it fell towards evening and then the land was held in a hard penetrating frost. The peasants wore pinched looks, and the German armoured cars clattered through the villages. The cocks crew, the dogs howled, but the people were silent. There was a shortage of fuel; in the château Anne huddled, grateful for Parisian furs which Lucien had found her. They had formerly belonged to Polly, who hated Provence and had feared the boredom of its winters.
My grandmother had asked no questions about what had happened in Vichy, why Lucien was no longer a Minister. Instead she recounted how disaffection was rife in the villages, how anti-clericalism and Socialism flourished. ‘They say they are fighting the Germans, but canaille like that are always out only for themselves. They are not preparing to fight against something they think is wrong. That’s just wh
at they say, but don’t you believe it. Fine words don’t ripen the harvest. What they want is our property, nothing less. And they attack the Church first.’
Her mutterings had the repetitive quality of madness.
‘I never thought I’d be grateful to see Germans, but what would we do without them?’
‘Do you know why the young men run off to the Maquis?’ she asked. ‘It’s because they’re thieves who don’t want to work.’
At her request the curé approached Lucien.
‘You must understand that I speak out of respect,’ he said. ‘I’m not a man of the world, but nevertheless I understand how things are. All the same, Monsieur de Balafré, this irregular liaison … well, naturally, I comprehend … but … you haven’t been to confession because you can’t come and you are likewise excluded from Communion. Well, I don’t have to tell you that your immortal soul … at a time moreover when any of us may be summoned at any moment to meet our Maker … and there’s another thing besides, the example … this decision to install your mistress in what is after all your mother’s house, well, it’s offensive to her. Have you thought of that?
‘It was astonishing,’ he said later, ‘with what tolerance he received my reproof. But that tolerance caused me anxiety, it was so close to indifference. And moral indifference of that sort is but the twinkling of an eye from the mortal sin of accidie. I was perturbed.’
Lucien said: ‘Monsieur le Curé, you have done your duty. But you know of course that I have not been without sin in the past, even here, in this house. There is poor Marthe after all, and you know very well that young Jacques is my son, perhaps now – who can tell? – the only son I have, even though born, as you must say, in sin, on the wrong side of the blanket. Believe me, however, I respect you, and I value my soul. But then there’s the question of sanity. Without Mademoiselle Querouaille, I must tell you, I would have gone mad this last year. I’m sure of that. A madness of what you call indifference. I trust in the good God and that he will forgive me.’
Early in February a German unit was instructed to take up its quarters in the château. Lucien protested to the local Commander, was assured that it was necessary.
‘There is notable disaffection in your neighbourhood, very many young men taking to the mountains to avoid the duty of labour service in Germany on behalf of the Reich, as ordained in the regulations of the French Republic.’
The Commander, a fat little man with a Himmler pince-nez, sat trapped between his chair and his desk. The front of his tunic was squeezed out like a woman’s breasts. His skin shone pink from scrubbing.
‘They’re for your protection too, Monsieur de Balafré. We have information that you, as a former Minister of the French Republic and a good friend of Germany, have been nominated as what they call “a legitimate target” by the dissident groups.’
But Lucien could not escape the suspicion that the German unit was also detailed to spy on him.
‘Of course they are,’ Anne said. ‘You have after all resigned your post. You are known to be a French patriot, and they must be beginning to wonder if your interpretation of patriotism has changed. You will be careful, my dear, won’t you? I couldn’t bear to lose you too.’
‘And do you think it has changed?’
‘That depends. Surely no one can be certain of what patriotism means at the moment.’
‘One thing I’m sure of,’ Lucien said, ‘is that true patriotism can’t mean the sort of activities which result in reprisals against ordinary decent people. Have you seen this?’
He pushed a copy of a local newspaper towards her. It carried a report of executions carried out by the Germans at a village only twenty miles away. Ten men had been shot because a German lieutenant had been killed in an ambush ten days previously, and his murderer had not been surrendered.
‘How many wrongs create a right?’ he asked. Then bent to try to kiss her tears away. But she sobbed in his arms, shaking and trembling, her tears salt on his lips, cracked by the wind, and on his tongue.
The German unit conducted itself properly. Its commanding officer was a very young man, a dedicated Nazi, but nevertheless punctilious in his observances of the proprieties.
‘He believes it is proper that the master race should set a moral example,’ Anne said.
‘Don’t be ironical, it doesn’t suit you. We should consider ourselves lucky.’
Lucien’s nerves were frayed. He had never spoken sharply to Anne before; she had often been amazed by his unnatural calm and forebearance.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and kissed him. ‘But it’s a sort of refuge.’
‘It’s a temptation.’
He used such influence as he still had to try to persuade the villagers and townspeople to observe regulations and abide within the law.
‘And does that mean we must let our sons be carted off to Germany?’ he was asked.
‘I’m afraid it does. Because if you defy these regulations things will be worse. It will be impossible to offer you any protection.’
He tried, yet again, to speak to his mother about Armand, and to urge her to realise that Armand was, in his own way, a patriot.
‘Whom do you respect,’ he said, ‘those members of families like your own who remained émigrés throughout the Empire, or those who returned like my father’s family and served Napoleon?’
‘It isn’t the same thing,’ she said; but he knew it was; people had different, yet equally certain, ideas of France.
Rupert arrived there in September. He had a week’s leave. He was surprised to find the German unit in residence. No one had warned him. Surely it wasn’t necessary.
‘Necessary?’ said Lucien with a lift of the eyebrow.
But he felt younger to see Rupert. They embraced each other.
‘I have almost full use of my arm now,’ Rupert said. ‘The doctors thought it impossible. Perhaps we should always distrust experts.’
‘What do the experts say about the progress of the war? I’m out of things now, you understand.’
‘You’re lucky.’
Rupert glanced at the German officer who had entered the room, and barely acknowledged the exaggerated heel-clicking salute he was accorded.
The curé said: ‘Yes, I met Rupprecht von Hülenberg. I liked him, he was obviously a good man, intellectual, not very intelligent. Your poor father expanded in his presence. He gave him back confidence and hope. He made him believe in possibilities. I don’t know how. I met him at dinner. There was little talk of the war, perhaps because the other German officer was there, very stiff, very correct, very punctilious. Clearly neither Lucien nor von Hülenberg was at ease with him. Marthe served us her famous anchovy tart, I remember. He was very gentle, von Hülenberg. I was astonished that a German could be so gentle.’
Lucien and Rupert walked in the hills, the same hills where only seven years later I went shooting with young Jacques. Did Rupert recognise in those Provençal hills the significance for Lucien which the eastern marshes held for him? Did he recognise in them the strength of Latinity?
They would have talked philosophy, of the amateurish sort in which they had always indulged. Did he ask about Maurras, Lucien’s old hero, adhering to fixed ideas which had never been applicable and which were all the less applicable in those years when it was plausible to argue that they were in fact being enacted?
Certainly, it was in these conversations held as they lay on thyme-scented hilltops, under the deep blue sky that promised enduring sunshine, that Rupert opened his heart to his friend. There were things stirring in Germany. He had friends – they were a loosely-knit group of true patriots – who were determined on change. The war?
‘The war,’ Rupert said, in a phrase that stuck in Lucien’s mind, ‘has been the wrong shape from the start.’
Germany, as he saw it, had no quarrel in the west. It had long ceased to be the natural enemy of France. He and Lucien had agreed on that over and over again, and nothing that had happened since altered that
conviction.
‘Overseas colonies? We have never needed them. Our mission is, as it has always been, in the east. It should now be a mission of civilisation, not of war, for the days when you could impose civilisation by war are long past. But we have been dragged into this war, which we are losing. We must extricate ourselves, and to do so we must eliminate Hitler and his gang of bungling cutthroats. To do so effectively, we must be prepared; and if the right results are to follow we must be prepared beyond Germany also. It’s the right psychological moment that is necessary. Are you a friend of Laval, Lucien?’
‘Laval has no friends.’
‘He will need them, and I think we need Laval.’
He mentioned names, since famous: von Stauffenberg, Adam zu Solz von Trott, Bielenberg; Lucien had met some of them. He felt proud of Rupert’s confidence. Their conversation inspired him with the hope that something would be saved from the wreckage.
So when, in the winter of ’43, two or three months after that visit from Rupert, he received a summons to visit Laval at Châteldon, he acceded eagerly. He left the following report.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Document 13: Certainly from the Confessions
MONSIEUR LAVAL ONCE said to me: ‘Don’t you know Châteldon? There’s no other place like it in the world. It’s a village in a valley, with hills all round and vineyards on the hills. We make a fine wine there. No Burgundy, certainly, you understand, but a fine wine all the same. I like it, it’s what I’ve been accustomed to drinking all my life, and that sort of knowledge and familiarity means a lot to me. It’s an old village, Châteldon, with mediaeval houses, the true France. In the valley there’s a knoll with an old castle on it. That’s my home. You must visit me there, Monsieur de Balafré, if you really wish to understand me. I have always believed that you can only understand a man when you know his calf-country and have seen him there. It’s the east winds of Picardy that have formed the Marshal, you know.’
