by John Baxter
“Would it show whether he experienced anything remarkable in France?”
“Remarkable? You mean more remarkable than being shot, bayoneted, blown up, gassed?”
“Something more personal. Intimate.” I explained about the cité des ténèbres and San Fairy Ann.
“Well, some weird stuff did go on,” he said. “When I get back, I’ll send you some books. There’s been an enormous amount published about things that previously got swept under the carpet.”
“You mean desertions? Executions at dawn? That sort of thing?”
Real Australian diggers at a camp in Wiltshire, 1917
“Oh, yes, all those. But I was thinking of the mutinies, rapes, murders. And the mystical stuff too: miraculous interventions, angels . . .”
He looked at the gray sky that seemed to be settling on the metal roofs of the city as if to stifle us.
“It’s something to do with France. War here was . . .” Shaking his head as if to dislodge a troubling thought, he turned up his collar. “You think it’s going to rain?”
I watched him disappear down the winding staircase of our apartment building. Murders. Rapes. Angels? Clearly I had a lot to learn.
16
They Knew
Is there any hope that it will not be war? If Austria attacks Serbia, why should that mean that France must attack Germany and my boys go to be killed? Serbia is nothing but a name to me. And yet I must suffer this. Tell me, is such a thing possible?
ANONYMOUS FRENCH MOTHER IN AUGUST 1914, reported by Herbert Adams Gibbons
The sage-green boxes of the booksellers known as bouquinistes line both banks of the Seine from the Musée d’Orsay to Notre Dame. They are as much a tourist attraction as the caricaturists of Montmartre’s Place du Tertre and the accordion virtuosi who work the métro along line 1, La Défense–Château de Vincennes, reminding us that man’s ingenuity can always find new ways to mangle “La Vie en Rose.”
But just as no Parisian ever poses for a caricature or encourages the buskers by giving them money, only tourists buy from the bouquinistes. Not only are their books overpriced; most are tightly wrapped in cellophane and Scotch tape. Try to discover if one has all its pages or somebody has used a slice of jambon sec as a bookmark and the seller will come bolting from his stool at the sunny edge of the sidewalk to snatch it from your fumbling fingers.
But travel any weekend to the fifteenth arrondissement, on the southern edge of the city, and you find a different atmosphere. Only the trade knows the year-round market for old books at the Espace George Brassens. They call it colloquially by the name of the street on which it stands, rue Brancion.
It’s at Brancion that the treasures surface, hauled in from the country by jobbers who’ve cleared the stock of a bankrupt bookshop or the shelves of a country house. Ignoring the professionals who range leather-bound rarities alphabetically on custom-built collapsible shelves, these shifty characters pile their loot on trestle tables at one euro each, or five books for three, and watch clients descend like vultures on fresh kill.
The high-gabled open-sided pavilions with their stone-flagged floors were once an equine slaughterhouse. A bronze horse head over the gate reminds us of the animals that died here, as does the statue of an aproned fort, or strongman, with a side of beef draped as casually over his shoulders as a 1920s matron’s fur tippet.
Why had Peter van Diemen suggested we meet here? Probably because he knew that on weekends, particularly when the weather was warm, I could often be found browsing the tables piled with books, magazines, maps, and ephemera.
A bigger question was, why did he want to meet at all? His call, like everything else about him, was unexpected. Had we exchanged phone numbers? I didn’t remember giving him mine. And we’re not listed in the phone book.
“Our chat at the embassy got me thinking,” he had said on the phone. “I believe I could help you with your project.”
There was no “project.” And I wasn’t sure I wanted Peter van Diemen in my life. But to someone who had, after all, killed a woman with his bare hands, attention had to be paid.
“That’s great,” I said, with an enthusiasm I didn’t feel. “When are you free?”
I spotted him before he saw me, and I stood for a moment, letting the damp and cold of the stone flags seep through the soles of my shoes.
T. S. Eliot wrote of his hollow men having “shape without form, shade without colour.” That was Peter. His gabardine overcoat, the indeterminate hue of cigarette ash, could have been made in the 1920s and hung at the back of a closet ever since, sagging into shapelessness as all color leached into the dark. His brown lace-up shoes, thick-soled, scuffed but well kept, belonged to another era as well, when footwear was made by hand, kept stretched on shoe trees between wearings, and, at country-house weekends, placed outside the guest’s door to be polished overnight by the boot boy.
His dress and manner made him as insubstantial and diaphanous as a background extra in a black-and-white movie. In the week following the murder, he made five return trips by bus to the golf course where he buried the body, each time carrying dismembered portions in a large suitcase. And yet the police, interviewing bus drivers and people who traveled regularly on the same line, could find no one who remembered him.
Yesterday, upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there . . .
As if the thought signaled my presence, he turned and saw me. His smile was less thin today, almost warm. Or was I just getting used to it?
“So you found me.”
I nodded at the stock of the dealer beside whose stand we’d met. “It wasn’t too hard.”
Not all sellers at Brancion specialized, but I knew that the middle-aged woman who sat impassively on a hard chair, ignoring us as she smoked a Gauloise and leafed through Aladdin, the monthly magazine for chineurs—antiques people—sold only militaria.
“Adele often has interesting things. Like this.”
He unrolled a yellowing sheet of paper, placing books at the corners to keep it flat. The uncompromising Didot roman typeface proclaimed it as a French government notice, designed to be read even by people to whom reading did not come naturally.
ARMY OF LAND AND ARMY OF SEA.
ORDER OF GENERAL MOBILIZATION
By decree of the President of the Republic, the mobilization of the armies of land and sea is ordered, as well as the requisition of animals, carriages and harness necessary to the supplying of these armies.
THE FIRST DAY OF THE MOBILIZATION IS
Sunday, August 3, 1914
Every Frenchman, subject to military obligation, must, under penalty of being punished with all the rigor of the law, obey the prescriptions of his book of mobilization.
Subject to this order are ALL MEN not at present under the flag.
The civil and military Authorities are responsible for the execution of this decree.
THE MINISTER OF WAR, THE MINISTER OF THE NAVY.
“It’s original?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. These aren’t particularly rare. A copy would have been posted in every town hall, every police station, every railway station and post office—and not only in continental France but Corsica, Algeria, and all the French dependencies as well. That’s what makes this so fascinating.”
My incomprehension showed. But fortunately obsessives love to explain.
“For this poster to be available in all those places on the same day, it had to be printed and distributed in advance.”
His finger stabbed at the date of mobilization. It wasn’t printed like the rest but stamped by hand.
I could visualize the policemen, customs officers, or postmasters putting down the phone and leaving their lunch to hurry to the office. They’d have rummaged in their stationery cupboard for the poster sent days—even weeks?—before, with orders to hold it until . . . well, until a German platoon on maneuvers took a wrong turn and crossed a frontier or some drunk sentry at an Alsatian border post fired at his opposite
number on the other side. Or a dying boy in an obscure Croatian town put a couple of bullets into a midlevel Austrian aristo and his lady.
Taking the stamp with which they dated all correspondence, the officials would have breathed on it to moisten the ink and inserted in the blank space the precise moment on which the world went to war.
“They knew,” said Peter quietly. “Weeks, even months before. They knew.”
All the way back from Brancion, an obscure fact nibbled at my memory. The source came to me just as I arrived home. From my shelves, the vivid orange cloth and art deco spine of Nina Hamnett’s memoir Laughing Torso almost leaped out. Sculptor, model, friend of Modigliani, and, in her day, lover of almost everyone else in Montparnasse, Hamnett had been in Paris in 1914. Her lover at the time, a German, was briefly interned at the Prefecture. Few Germans were. “He had known many Germans as we all did,” she wrote. “Oddly enough, a few days before the declaration of war, all the Germans vanished from the Quarter.”
If the French knew what was coming, it seemed the Germans did as well.
17
But We Think You Ought to Go
We’ve watched you playing cricket and every kind of game,
At football, golf and polo you men have made your name.
But now your country calls you to play your part in war.
And no matter what befalls you
We shall love you all the more.
So come and join the forces
As your fathers did before.
PAUL RUBENS, lyrics to “Your King and Country Want You,” 1914
The Paris métro line 4, Porte de Clignancourt–Porte d’Orléans, runs right by the foot of our street, rue de l’Odéon. A few days after meeting Peter at Brancion, I took it northbound. At the Château d’Eau stop, I surfaced onto boulevard de Strasbourg, into a cluster of grinning young Africans offering suspect mobile phone cards.
A few blocks away, the façade of the Gare de l’Est, the eastern station, marked the end of the boulevard. It hadn’t changed much since 1914. Back then, even the phone card vendors would have had their contemporary equivalents—voyous selling tip sheets with guaranteed winners at Chantilly and Longchamp, or copies of the sports papers that handicapped the bike races at the Vél d’Hiv.
From the moment of mobilization, attention in France shifted to the railways. With little public road transport and almost no private cars, they were the commonest form of travel. On that Sunday in August 1914, the morning of mobilization, passengers on expresses heading into Paris found their carriages invaded. “We were besieged by crowds of reservists,” an American wrote, “until there was no more room and the engine could draw no more extra carriages. Then we crept slowly toward Paris, bearing our offering of human lives. One could feel, mingled with the effervescence, the excitement, the joy of approaching conflict, an undertone of anguish and sorrow.”
A French journalist felt differently.
At every station, reservists got on. Workers and peasants mostly, with their poor baggage. They clogged the corridors, because there were already fifteen people in every compartment meant for ten. As more boarded at Maintenon, Chartres and Nogent, they moved into the first class; these brave men among officers; respectful, disciplined, confident. They spoke among themselves and very intelligently with us about the different phases of the crisis. All of them read the papers regularly. They understood perfectly the true character of the crisis. One said, “It had to happen. We’ve been insulted for forty-four years.” Another said, “We aren’t sad. We’re serious.” It was true. They didn’t sing. They didn’t demonstrate. They embodied, these humble men, the firm dignity of the nation.
Arriving in Paris at one of the grandes gares, the great railway stations, conscripts had to make their way to the designated rallying point for their unit, usually a large café. From there, they were sent to an embarkation point. For most, that was the Gare de l’Est. Many found it easier to walk. From a restaurant in the rue Royale, Edith Wharton watched them pass.
The street was flooded by the torrent of people. All were on foot, and carrying their luggage; for since dawn every cab and taxi and motor-omnibus had disappeared. The crowd that passed our window was chiefly composed of conscripts who were on the way to the station. Wives and families trudged beside them, carrying all kinds of odd improvised bags and bundles. The faces ceaselessly streaming by were serious but not sad; nor was there any air of bewilderment—the stare of driven cattle. All these lads and young men seemed to know what they were about and why they were about it. The youngest of them looked suddenly grown up and responsible; they understood their stake in the job, and accepted it.
Contingents from other nations marched with them. They carried hastily prepared banners assuring their support.
Rumania Rallies to the Mother of the Latin Races
Italy, Whose Freedom Was Purchased with French Blood
Spain, the Loving Sister of France
Greeks Who Love France
Scandinavians of Paris
South American Lives for the Mother of South American Culture
Loud cheers greeted BELGIUM LOOKS TO FRANCE and LUXEMBOURG WILL NEVER BE GERMAN, but the crowd really went wild as a group passed under the banner ALSATIANS GOING HOME.
Summer holidays in France always begin on August 1. It’s an immovable feast, as cut in stone as Christmas Day or France’s national day, July 14. In any other August, Parisians would have been streaming out of the city, heading for that almost mystical reunion with the region of their birth that is central to the French vacances.
Their numbers would have been swelled by foreign tourists, many headed for the Gare de l’Est to board the Orient Express, traveling via Strasbourg, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, and Bucharest to Istanbul. Normally these well-heeled travelers crowded the departure hall, exchanging kisses and going-away gifts as porters hustled brass-bound trunks into the luggage vans.
Gare de l’Est, August 1914
Instead, this August, to their astonishment, most were sent home. Only military trains were running. A cartoon showed a man telling a railway man, “I’m in a hurry. I’ve got to be somewhere in two hours,” and the official replying, “Alsace has been waiting for 44 years. You’re not saying your impatience compares with hers?” Edith Wharton, who had no travel plans, took perverse satisfaction in the tourists’ comeuppance. “The civilians who had not bribed and jammed their way into a cranny of the thronged carriages leaving the first night could only creep back through the hot streets to their hotel and wait. Back they went, to the resounding emptiness of porterless halls, waiterless restaurants, motionless lifts: to the queer disjointed life of fashionable hotels suddenly reduced to the intimacies and makeshift of a Latin Quarter pension.”
For the young reservists, being in Paris on their way to war was better than a holiday. Tanned farm boys, seeing a city for the first time, gaped at the cars, the crowds, the vaulted ceiling of the Gare de l’Est. In the patois of Brittany and Normandy, they drawled their astonishment to uncomprehending street kids, pale and rat-thin, freshly rousted by the police from the lanes of Montmartre. Over the next few years, deaths at the front would confer on this terminus a sinister, even menacing, character. When someone asked after an absent son, father, or husband, women would say somberly, “He was eaten by the East.”
Today, I had no trouble crossing the wide courtyard in front of the station, but in August 1914 it would have been a struggle. Conscripts and their families blocked the area solid, joined by the curious and the frustrated private passengers. Residents around the square looked down on an ocean of straw hats, the traditional summer headgear of the average Parisian, either the stiff canotiers the British called “boaters,” or soft Panamas, so popular that the slang term for Paris’s working-class suburbs was “Panama,” shortened to “Panam.”
Le Départ des Poilus, Août 1914 by Albert Herter
Many in the crowd that day were drunk, either from elation or despair. When a café opposite the
station tried to exploit this by raising prices, customers rampaged through its three floors, smashing every piece of glass. English and American journalists who came to investigate were boosted onto tabletops and ordered, in celebration of the Triple Alliance, to sing “My Country ’Tis of Thee” and “God Save the Queen.”
Fortunately, the architects who renovated the Gare de l’Est in 1931 preserved its windowed stone halls. Hanging overhead in one of them was the painting I’d come to see. Le Départ des Poilus, Août 1914 is eighty meters square—almost as wide and tall as the railway carriage it depicts. The American artist Albert Herter painted it in 1926 and presented it to the nation. Since then, it’s been on display here, first along the wall of the departure hall, then higher up, where one can admire the composition, even if the details aren’t so clear.
It shows a typical scene of August 1914. Fathers in uniform say good-bye to their families. Husbands hug wives. One man, apparently in despair, sits with his head in his hands. Young men crowd the carriage windows, most in shirtsleeves because of the heat. A few look excited. Others are indifferent. At the center of the composition, one boy stands in a doorway, kepi in one hand, carbine in the other, arms flung out in a gesture that could represent either ecstasy or protest. The lily jutting from the barrel of his rifle is ambiguous; is it there as the symbol of Bourbon France or as the traditional Anglo-Saxon flower of funerals? No less enigmatic are the figures of a gray-bearded man on the far right and a woman with clasped hands on the left. Neither looks at the soldiers. The man carries a bunch of flowers and has laid his hand on his heart. The woman looks pensively into the middle distance, her mind elsewhere.
The canvas trades in that sense of time lost and regained that preoccupied Proust and Cocteau. For Herter, as for many writers and artists who found their material in the war, mixing the present and the past became a form of denial, a refusal to accept the waste and anarchy.
