One who did not come home was Anatole Gonnin, the eldest of four boys all born in the 1890s to the family who were then tenant farmers at Villemort. The old miniature castle had descended to country uses: hay was stacked in its medieval chapel and on its Saracen staircase hens hopped. But the Gonnins were a respected family, even if they were not the equal in property of the Graizons, who were established on the one-time Charbonnier property at Le Flets. Villemort was so isolated, except from the new railway line through the wood, that by field paths the Graizons were the Gonnins’ nearest neighbours. In the summer of 1914 Anatole, then aged twenty-five, was keeping company with Marie Graizon, an only daughter who would not be seventeen till the November. By November, Marie was pregnant and Anatole was at the front.
In village lore the exact dates have long been clouded in respectful reticence; the sequence of events is recited rhetorically, with much rolling of ‘r’s’ for the story has taken on a symbolic quality and represents all the personal tragedies of that time.
‘He came back from the war for just three days to marry her – then three days more when their son was born – and then that was that. Finished. Gone. Poor girl, she had no married life with him at all.’
In reality, events were a little less apocalyptic if just as bleak, for when Marie went into labour Anatole was already on leave, convalescing with a wounded arm. As the hours went by, he had to report back to barracks in Châteauroux before the child had appeared. It was the Chassignolles midwife who sent a message to him by means of the telephone in the Mairie, to tell him that he was the father of a son. He survived in the trenches for two years more before he was killed. His younger brother had already died there, a third was taken prisoner on the eastern front and returned after the war crippled and ‘half out of his mind’. But it is in the rest of young Madame Gonnin’s story that the peculiar tragedy lies.
The child Aimé Gonnin was brought up by his mother in her parents’ house and the hopes of all three were concentrated on him. From the village school he was sent to continue his education in La Châtre, then to study law in Limoges. He had his bicycle, his dog, his gun, his horse; later, when he was back in La Châtre articled to a local lawyer, he had his own car. He loved his mother and grandparents and was good at drawing. Photographs of him show a solid, short but rather handsome Berrichon with a cowlick of black hair and a noticeable resemblance to the writer Alain-Fournier. By 1939 he was all set to fulfil the family dream and became a successful member of the local bourgeoisie, the equivalent of a Pissavy-Yvernault. About the same time, the old farmhouse was abandoned for a new house the Graizons had built alongside, a home for gentlefolk with four or five well-lit rooms downstairs, each with a decoratively tiled or parquet floor. The aged Jean Beaumont (Apaire) had directed the setting of the roof timbers, and under that roof several good bedrooms with dormers had been planned: plenty of space for a new generation.
The bedrooms were never installed.
Aimé was one of the very few young men of Chassignolles – a handful compared with those of the previous war – not to return from the second one. Before the fall of France, he trod on a mine near the frontier with Belgium. That, once again, was that.
‘I remember her arriving at church for Mass the week after he’d been killed. She was like a spectre herself.’ Madame Calvet, a generation younger.
Today, more than fifty years later, young Madame Gonnin is old Madame Caillaud, la doyenne de la commune. She is a survivor in every sense; in spite of her great age and her failing sight she is a neat, erect figure, dressed in sprigged navy with a small shawl of her own crochet work. Brisk, cheerful, firm in manner, devoted to her flowery garden and to current-affairs programmes on the radio, she lives alone with only a daily visit from the home-help who cooks her dinner – a well-built person on a motor bike described by Madame Caillaud, with a nice social nuance, as ‘my little help’. Yet the final, dominating role of her long and variegated life is that of an icon of suffering. She is a village memorial, just as much as the stone one near the church, to both wars together.
‘After the second war the Government offered me a decoration. They said it was because I had given both my loved ones to France. I refused it. I didn’t give my own. They were taken from me.’
Long after her parents, too, were dead, she remarried. Monsieur Caillaud was a jolly widower and near-neighbour. ‘We were supping together most evenings anyway,’ he told a male friend. ‘All I had to do was push the gate a little further open.’
Then, for about ten years, Marie had, according to her old friend Jeanne Pagnard, ‘a proper life’:
‘They had a little car. Went on visits and trips. Meals out and so on. She was really happy.’
But then he died, as men do. Alone once again, Madame Caillaud lived on, guardian of the house that had been built to contain a future but which had become a museum of memories.
* * *
I visited her first on a still, golden afternoon in autumn, cycling past the football field – Stade Aimé Gonnin – that the family gave to the Commune. Leaves detached themselves silently from the horse and Spanish chestnuts one by one. She welcomed me graciously, offered Maxwell House coffee in miniature china vases, wondered energetically in passing if the coffee had been manufactured by that fat, drowned Englishman of whom she had just heard on the radio; wasn’t he supposed to have embezzled…? But it was clear that her main purpose in inviting me was to show me over her shrine. As we moved through the rooms, the framed photos of her son at every stage and size – as a baby, receiving his first Communion, with friends in a hayfield, with others in a Limoges street, dressed for la chasse, at the wheel of his car – were like so many Stations of the Cross, each one requiring its own discourse. There too were his crayon drawings – beloved spaniel, beloved mother – and his qualifying certificate for his final law exams – ‘I received that weeks and weeks after he’d been killed …
‘We’d only just moved into the house. This was to have been his room.’ A bedspread of heavy crocheted lace, Madame Caillaud’s own work. Above the bed-head, a large wooden crucifix. She is said to be a devout believer ‘in spite of everything’; certainly, in younger days, the Pissavy-Yvernault granddaughter who occupied Mademoiselle Guyot’s house, taught the catechism and burnt George Sand’s letters, was an object of her particular affection. (‘Jeanne Pagnard has always had a fondness for Madame L, but her sister was my special friend.’) But resigned acceptance of God’s Will in the tradition of the dying Louis Yvernault does not seem to form part of Madame Caillaud’s piety. I understood that day that this woman is a fighter by nature, not a forgiver.
Also on the walls, numerous tapestry pictures, that same ladylike gros point work that Célestine took to in middle life – ‘Yes, I did those too. I loved to embroider before my eyes went.’ Flowers, a castle like Sarzay, a careful rendering of Millet’s ‘The Gleaners’. This pretty, silent house is a museum to more than the dead of the wars.
Things are preserved inside Madame Caillaud’s head, also, that have disappeared from the visible world. Given her great age, and the fact that she has always lived in a remote part of the Commune, for many years now she has paid only rare and fleeting visits to the centre of the village, and the Chassignolles that exists in her mind is still that of the 1940s and ’50s, complete with shops, a barber’s and a hairdresser’s. She was surprised when I mentioned one day that I wished I could have seen the stone staircase on the outside of the Chaumette-Robin inn.
‘But you can. Go and look at it!’
‘It’s not there any longer,’ I and Mademoiselle Pagnard, also present, spoke in unison. Mademoiselle Pagnard, disapproving of such a lapse – lets the side of the elderly down – went on sternly.
‘You saw it demolished yourself, when Mesmin Chauvet renovated the place.’
‘Really?’ A rapt, disbelieving look came into Madame Caillaud’s near-sightless eyes. Presently she said, with dismissive dignity:
‘Nevertheless, I can
see it absolutely clearly.’
Of Anatole Gonnin himself, the helpless author of her long-term destiny, Madame Caillaud speaks little, and there is only one picture of him. By comparison with his all-present son, this lost husband seems shadowy, too remote now in time to raise many echoes within her. Or it may be that she never knew him well: as people say, she never lived with him.
This, indeed, is the peculiar poignancy that attaches itself to the names of the young men in the war memorial. Enfants de Chassignolles, in French parlance, born out of the very earth of the place, flesh of parents and grandparents raised on its produce, many of them were wiped out before anyone could know them as adults, before they could even know themselves. When people still alive claim ‘that first war changed everything … the village was never the same after that’, I have come to believe that the removal of the young men, their subjection to an alien and terrible dimension of experience, is a large part of what is being indicated. Even those who did come back were not the same; they had been changed. Since they were the chief inheritors and perpetuators of village life, that life could not be the same either. In comparison, the social effects of the second war and France’s defeat, however far-reaching, are perceived in Chassignolles as having been much less devastating. The annual ceremony by the memorial each 11 November, though ostensibly a remembrance for both wars, is really concerned with the first one. The roll call is read, and this is known as the Appel des Morts, as if the intention were indeed to call up again those children of Chassignolles to their own territory. The impression is reinforced by the deployment of the present-day schoolchildren, lined up with combed hair, to repeat after each name the refrain ‘mort pour la Patrie’ – ‘died for France’.
I have known several village survivors of the First World War. One liked to mention to us regularly his voyage to the Dardanelles – ‘You come from across the sea too, I believe … But perhaps not the same sea?’ Another, Denise Bonnin’s husband, was celebrated for having been for forty days in the charnel-house of the Fort of Douarmont, by Verdun, and having escaped ‘without a scratch’. But such oft-reiterated facts form, after decades, their own carapace, a barrier against real memory rather than a continuing key to it.
They are all gone now, these old soldiers, at last joining friends who could, in age, be their great-grandsons. Only in written accounts, today, can one hope to recover some authentic breath of what Anatole Gonnin and his generation experienced.
‘At the front, Robert had seen many of his comrades fall, but not till he came back on leave [to his own farm] and saw the snow lying on the meadow did he feel their deaths pressing on his mind.’ (Campagne, Raymonde Vincent)
Robert thinks of the sown wheat beneath the earth, and of how long it will be till it is grown and harvested. Will he ever enjoy that harvest? And his girlfriend – is she too ‘something good that he will never have’? In any case, he himself cannot take things as he did before. He struggles to explain:
‘“When I came home, I thought I’d find the house, the fields, the animals and the people as well, all just the same to me as they were before. But it hasn’t turned out like that, none of these things have the same weight for me…”’
It is as if he has left the place spiritually even before his physical departure. He is sure now that he will not return again, and he is right. When the news of his death inevitably comes, even his father’s suffering ‘was hardly greater, because he had envisaged the loss of his son so acutely even before it took place.’
The final chapters of the novel are more cheerful. The war is over, the younger daughter marries. The aunt comforts herself with a notion of the circularity of time, which owes less to any Christian doctrine of survival than to an older perception based on experience of the natural cycles – ‘Everything comes back, everything begins again. A bad winter never prevented a fine spring.’
In her dreams, Robert’s sister goes on expecting him to come back.
‘Again and again she thought she saw him. He would arrive on foot, always as the night was falling, so that she never quite managed to see his face.’ Sometimes she catches sight of him in the distance, in the avenue of chestnut trees; sometimes he doesn’t recognize her; sometimes she is outside and sees him go into the house, but when she runs in the place is empty – or full of people she has never seen before.
This last dream seems to reach beyond the specific losses of war, into the wider territory of time that, in the end, does the same work. It is as if the young girl who later became Raymonde Vincent the novelist had momentarily visited the long future. We all of us, if we live to be old, find the places of our youth are empty, or full of strange faces. For the individual who lasts as long as Madame Caillaud, every single person who surrounded his or her youth has gone, ‘ghosts at cockcrow’. I try a tentative question on her.
‘Yes, well I have a lot of time these days … I quite often catch myself thinking, I haven’t seen so-and-so recently. I wonder how he’s doing? And then I think, Oh. If I’m the oldest person, he must be dead at present.’
‘Mort à présent’. Such is Madame Caillaud’s phrase. Others too use this formula, a technically correct but slightly archaic French which seems to replace the definite concept of ‘now’ with the suggestion of a more temporary state. Bernardet in his last years, complaining of ageing, used to say ‘Je suis vieux, à présent.’
Again, that sense of time’s circularity, a hint that youth and vigour, the Cavalcade of 1912, the recruits of 1914, the mythic Golden Age, have simply gone for a long winter season, as plants do under the cold earth, and will one day return.
Chapter 16
Three years after the First World War ended, twenty-year-old Denise Apaire married. Her sister and brother-in-law were dead; their parents, left late in life with an orphaned granddaughter to rear, were old and weary. But Denise’s wedding cheered everyone up.
She was a pretty girl, and she was also rather lucky. With so many of the younger men gone for ever from Chassignolles and all the other villages, many of her generation remained single. A daughter of a well-established local family, whom I only knew when old age had converted her into a substantial personality, physically and mentally, used to proclaim that she could have married if she’d wanted but husbands weren’t worth the bother – ‘what with having to do their washing. I’d like one at night, now, to keep me from being scared, but for anything else – pough!’ Even Anatole Gonnin’s attractive and well-off widow, who had her own reasons to appreciate the power of ‘anything else’, did not remarry till late in life. But Denise, who had been just too young in the war to mourn a dead suitor, was marrying handsome Georges Bonnin from St Denis de Jouhet, six years older than herself, he who had a fine singing voice and had survived unscathed at Verdun and indeed for an entire four years of war.
I know they made a handsome couple, as I possess a copy of their wedding photo. Like most of those taken in Chassignolles in the 1920s, this one was done by the war widow of a La Châtre photographer, intrepidly carrying on the business. It was rather a new departure then for a family like the Apaires to have a photo taken: the fifty-odd family and guests, carefully rigid on chairs and trestles at the side of the church, seem poised too between rusticity and gentility, and between past and future. In the front row Denise’s parents gaze warily out of the past. Little Jean Beaumont, his carpenter’s hands uneasy on his knees, wears a stiff, high-buttoned jacket of antique cut, and his thin old wife (who must once have had beautiful eyes) is dressed in the crêpe-trimmed jacket, floor-length skirt and black, ribboned cap of a nineteenth-century bereaved matron. On the other side of Georges, his mother wears the white peasant cap of the region, and another old lady, similarly capped, sports a many-tiered Victorian pelisse and a rolled parasol as an accessory. Meanwhile, up in the back row, young nephews and uncles play it cool in soft felt hats, double-breasted suits and striped ties that could be worn today. One has a cigarette in his mouth; another, who looks about fourteen, holds one nonchal
antly between his fingers: the habits acquired in the trenches had percolated through French society. The much-booted and ringletted children look like illustrations from E. Nesbit books of twenty years earlier; while many of the younger women, bareheaded, in dresses run up by Jeanne Pagnard’s grandmother and her assistants, seem to belong less to a stereotype of ‘The Twenties’ than to a timeless near-present. Just one Beauty, in a large-brimmed hat and feather boa, is clearly on her way into a more leisured existence.
Anatole Gonnin’s surviving brother married in Chassignolles that year also. So did Victor Pissavy’s youngest granddaughter. Sixty years later the three couples posed outside the church after a Mass to celebrate their collective diamond wedding. Beside the rather elegant figures of the Ls from the Domaine and of Lucien Gonnin, who wore a black patch over an eye kicked by a horse, the Bonnins appear diminutive, portly and, as in their original wedding photo, nervous. In daily life, however, they were quite at ease. Between the 1920s and the 1980s their farm prospered and expanded. Eventually they owned or rented bits of land all over the Commune, eighty-odd hectares in all, one of the largest holdings. They laboured from five in the morning till past nine at night, seven days a week, never counting their own toil as part of the equation, but they saw their lives becoming very gradually easier, and the Common Market subsidy system of the 1960s and ’70s appeared to them as an endorsement and just reward for all their efforts. By the time profits began insidiously to fall again and the whole utility of peasant farming began to be seriously called in question, Georges was dead and Denise was too old and deaf to bother herself much about such things.
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