The Single Solider: a moving war-time drama

by George Costigan

  Mother dropped Father’s gun down the well and packed Simone’s case. Simone took out one of the coats and put books in its place as the first planes strafed the town and the first shells broke up the Mairie. From the radio De Gaulle called for continued Resistance. Simone cried when her father struck her mother, finding the gun gone, and as a June Tuesday broke, the tanks came. Blew up the church, sprayed destruction and passed. And still he stood, as the jeeps and armoured cars spat out men.

  Two teenagers advanced on him and he cried, “Vive La France!” and nothing more as four bullets ripped his chest apart and sent him sprawling back into the kitchen, his life running ruined over his tiled floor. The boys stepped past the mess, kicked round the house and one went back outside to see if there was time for rape. There wasn’t. An officer ordered the women taken to the rubble-strewn town square to wait. The tares of the village gathered. Mute. Female or old. It took a silent half hour for the handful of men to be found and removed and then the women were marched to the station.

  As the soldiers crammed them into trains with rifle-butts and laughter her mother spat in a young, clean face and she was hauled off the train and Simone never saw her again. Orphaned in an hour.

  The train left for Paris, but at Crepy she got off and walked away from the station. She had her suitcase and her hate and with the refugee exodus she marched herself through Reims, Chalon and Troyes, racing the future gathering behind her. She was forty kilometres outside Dijon when capitulation came and Hitler took sweet revenge for the humiliation of 1918. France was halved.

  And with the others she strode south.

  Because she was young, twenty and pretty, she was befriended and abused more than most. A lorry driver took her virginity in return for a seventy kilometre lift and others more shards of her dignity for a bike or a night out of the rain and it seemed to mean only that her descent through France was quicker.

  She buried her dreams of teaching, of Paris, alongside the memory of her parents.

  She slept in beds, barns, ditches, rain; with cattle, sheep, fleas, tics, farmers and fellow refugees. From her suitcase the dispossessed stole her clothes and then stole those she stole to replace them. Her books no-one touched.

  Christmas 1940.

  She was placed with a family in time for their threadbare celebration. He was 57, she a year older, childless now, and they never spoke about anything. Her father had argued politics, religion, the weather, anything on which he could exercise his curiosity. These people were cowed and only too willing to trust Petain and Prime Minister Laval, to accept the defeat and “Attentisme”; to do nothing more than survive.

  Food was scarce, these prematurely aged people wouldn’t deal on the black-market and so it was scarcer still. France was like her family. Two-thirds dead and one third mute.

  Germany invaded Russia. She’d been so very much younger when her father had seethed with shame that Stalin should ravage Poland’s back, unprotected, as it fought Hitler at the front. She’d understood only a betrayal of his Socialism, a concept she hadn’t grasped. Now this news was greeted with pride. Prime Minister Laval said so on the crackly radio. He desired the victory of Germany because he believed Bolshevism to be a greater evil than Fascism. The man and woman nodded at the meagre dinner table and Simone asked herself what her thoughts were. She didn’t know. She’d only been thinking survival.

  But when the Legion of Honour sent a battalion to fight with the Bosche, to fight with her parent’s killers, to fight in German uniforms, and the couple grunted their hopeful approval, Simone began to search outside their bare house for a response. In the silent streets, in the hunched shoulders, in the darting eyes, she needed to believe in, at the very least, a confusion like hers.

  One Sunday after Mass she shook hands with the Curé and he invited her that evening to talk. She didn’t know what to expect. Anything was possible. Be cautious.

  They sat by the cold iron stove in his study, the walls loaded with books, and drank weak coffee. She talked of her past and her journey. He nodded, patient. A drip of her pain leaked out. He greeted it with his. At a government bankrupt of Christianity. The radio played jazz quietly and he told her of Pére Chaillet and an escape route south to Spain for orphaned Jewish children. An hour had passed when he gave her his blessing and she walked home. Bad joke – she had no home. Half a country away her roots lay wasted.

  Could she put down new ones here? With those people? In that house?

  Well, what else had she? What else was she?

  And what did the Curé want? Was any of what he said true? Was all of it? What did he want? She trusted him, that’s all she knew. No, she wanted to trust him.

  The following week Maréchal Petain, the hero of Verdun, Saviour of France, worker of the miracle – Freedom, walked the same streets and a hundred and fifty thousand greeted him with religious ecstasy. Her ‘family’ at their windows, crying. Roads solid with hope, as real as hers, and just as desperate, and this too stirred her, to stand tiptoe to see the white moustaches and the straight back. Joan of Arc grown old and male. And it was for this man the Curé had revealed his disgust. Was this man a disgrace? Were all these people fools, traitors?

  He shook her hand after Sunday Mass and she went to his rooms that evening. They talked, drank thin coffee and he tuned the radio to listen to Laval.

  “All communists are in the pay of the Jews...”

  He switched it off, disgusted, tainted, and gave Simone two broadsheet printed pieces of paper. “L’Humanité.” Warned her to let no one see it. Warned her again at the door.

  In her cold cot under the slope of the roof she read of unionists and communists being rounded up and sent to camps or deported, their wives imprisoned for protesting. She read of the vile Statute of Jews, of a synagogue in Nice ransacked whilst the police stood arms folded outside. She read it all and read it again, a void in her life filling with the anger of the writers, and with their search for like minds, for revenge, for Resistance, for Dignity. For a Response. It was the first she’d read since Peronne.

  The following week there were six already round his stove.

  A teacher, as she had dreamed of being, a butcher, a gendarme and three older ones, who identified themselves only as “French”. She sat, distrusted for her youth, her sex, her Northernness and her newness. At nine o’clock the Curé checked the quiet streets through his curtains and turned the radio on, tuned it minutely and faintly, and through the night London spoke and then De Gaulle spoke. Immediate interference. Military music. Vichy’s orders. The men cursed, apologised to her and then cursed worse.

  Still, De Gaulle was talking, and somewhere he would be heard. They turned it off to talk themselves. At last, she thought, talk.

  There was a blur of figures from the butcher. Arrests of French men and women denounced by French traitors, the scale of the requisitioning, proof of the black market and the ultimate economic deceit of Vichy, that four hundred million Francs a day was being paid to Germany. That was the price of their freedom, that was the price of being a favoured nation, that was why the cities were starving and that was a war crime itself.

  “Can’t eat figures,” one of the men grumbled.

  “They’re facts.”

  “Can’t eat them, either,” said another, shifting.

  “Then why pass on the newspaper?”

  “I don’t. I wipe my arse with it.”

  “Then why come?” the teacher asked.

  “The Hun.”

  A silence.

  The butcher spoke again. “They’re not our only enemy.”

  “They’re my only enemy,” said the first.

  “That and your ignorance.”

  “Not needing to be communist is not proof of ignorance my patronising friend. I want the Hun out of France.”

  “Why is he in France? Economics. Why is he not in The South? Economics. He doesn’t need to be in the South! We’re paying him to stay out!”

  “I know. I accept. But econ
omics won’t get him out. Economics is not the issue, Liberation is the issue. I’m poor and land is the only wealth of the poor.”

  Murder members of the local Gestapo, that was a response that would be understood. The teacher counseled non-violence and two of the men snorted. The Curé told them a German soldier had been killed, in Bordeaux. And two in Paris.

  “Good.”

  “In Bordeaux twenty-seven were killed as a reprisal. In Paris fifty.” There was silence.

  The Curé added, “Vichy selected the fifty. Communists, unionists, Jews. And their wives.”

  The teacher asked what would be achieved by the murder of even one collaborator.

  And one of them said, “I’d feel French.”

  “And we’d all be vulnerable.”

  “You mean this group is going to do nothing?”

  “This group doesn’t know yet what it should do,” said the Curé softly, “that’s why we’re talking.”

  “But you won’t mind what I might do, so long as it doesn’t affect you? This? This coffee-evening. This blather of theory. A wash-tub of women.”

  “Don’t reprisals matter to you?” The teacher seemed genuinely shocked.

  “People are not all the same. Not blessed equal in God’s sight. Some are scum. No use. All Germans, some French. This is no time for education, just remedy. You cut when the sickness is so bad nothing else will work. How bad must this get for you?”

  “And the slaughtered innocents – martyrs?” The Curé asked, sad.

  “Yes. Right since Herod, don’t patronise me. The world is changed by action. While wankers sit to talk. Call it politics and economics.”

  “Then you must act and may God guide your conscience.”

  “He will. And may He pity yours.”

  “He does.”

  The man stood and left. Before the week was out he was dead. Found in his room, shot.

  The silence the following Sunday spoke loudly of suspicion.

  Then there were twelve, including two from the University who wrote the paper. And they brought other papers. “Le Coq Enchainé” and “Liberation”. They were not alone.

  Each week she took her newspapers, folded inside her vest, and wondered what to do with them. She left one in the lavatory of a café, two in the library, one on a pew after eight o’clock Mass. It was weeks before she dared pass one directly to the friendly barman in a café. Her heart raced, and raced more as the man took it, nodded, and left her. When he came back with a different paper to give her she had fled, frightened, and that frightened him. He burnt both papers.

  The couple became afraid of her movements, and she toyed with which lie to tell them. A man? The church? She even considered telling the truth till she saw their horror when someone painted a cross of Lorraine, the symbol for a Free France, on a neighbour’s wall. So she said nothing, which frightened them more. At Mass each Sunday she prayed for Hope and they prayed she would go away.

  Each Sunday evening the group fragmented a little more. Action, action, how long will we do Nothing?

  In March their world spurted forward. The Berlin Philharmonic were coming to play Beethoven. In their town hall.

  Now the talk warmed.

  Police and collaborators would both be there.

  But they could surely be silent no longer. A line had been drawn. Demanding a response. They voted on slips of paper put in the Gendarme’s cap.

  Unanimous.

  The night of the concert they each made their separate ways to the town hall square. And found people gathered and gathering.

  Looking in each other’s eyes.

  It became a hundred. Another hundred. Still coming, gathering. More. A thousand now, surely. Standing behind a line of police and waiting. Silent. And as more came so they all caught the idea of Silence and it solidified. Two thousand, three, more; all of them keeping the night mute. Watching their town hall fill with fellow citizens, fellow French.

  The orchestra arrived, walking from wagons up the steps of the hall and stopped, facing this mass. Fifteen strings, eight brass, six woodwind, timpani, a harpist, a thirty-strong choir to sing “Ode To Joy” and they stopped, held by the harmony in silence, and faced three thousand. So these were the French. No wonder they were so easily beaten.

  The Mayor’s car drove up. Hands were shaken. And now one man ducked calmly under the linked arms of the police, crossed the cobbled square, up the steps, disappeared into the hall, came out with a leather and chestnut Louis Quinze chair, raised it over his head, and smashed it. The silence shattered into cheers. He was arrested. Sent to a camp.

  And the orchestra played, but Simone believed Beethoven would have been with them, listening as only a deaf man could, to the silence of hope in the bitter night.

  And now she allowed herself to believe in a future. If not for her, at least for France. That night in her cot she tasted it, rolled it round her body, couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t wait.

  From the radio Vichy banned celebrations of the fourteenth of July. At their next meeting the jubilant group could hardly believe its luck. Who in Lyon now would not protest at such a strike against French history? The butcher urged the Curé to preach Revolution the following Sunday. The Curé urged him to come back to the church.

  Laughter.

  But, the following Sunday the Curé preached shame and disgrace and his congregation slumped in their pews, avoiding the arrows of his pain and anger. Outside he shook her hand tightly and she felt paper passing palm to palm. In privacy she read that nine had been arrested, and the communists, the butcher and the two from the university sent to a concentration camp outside Bordeaux, and that she must leave. There was the name of a friend, another Jesuit in a mountain village, Souceyrac, three hundred kilometres south-west. Part of Pére Chaillet’s escape route. And under “God Will Be With You” he had added, “If you have to make a pact with the Devil to drive out Germans – you make a pact with the Devil, every time.”

  That night she became a refugee again. April 1942.

  Snow. In Clermont she was placed with a family who ignored her and she left after one silent meal, heading for the escape-route. How would she pay? With sex? What else had she? Unless she stole. She would certainly beg.

  She walked.

  Farmers took brief pity, a barn some nights, some nights their beds, some nights of her periods she accepted, then stole food and walked away whilst they slept from the sex. Rattled Mayors crowded stragglers like her into the school rooms of the smaller towns; perhaps a blanket, perhaps soup and always the same stories to listen to.

  She walked.

  She stole a bike and rode half a department before she woke one morning and found it stolen. She walked. Towards the Curé’s friend. What rumours she heard she discounted and then Pére Chaillet was arrested. That she believed. Would the escape route exist without him? What else could she do but hope? What else kept her walking? Into the Cantal.

  Open country beneath a brutal, icy sky. She found a plough, slept under it with ants in her hair. What am I? One crawled up her nose and she got up and walked.

  Le Rouget – six kilometres. She walked.

  She walked. With her case. Who am I? Who am I now? On this road, God knows where, going God knows where. I’m no resister, that’s for sure. I’m no hero – no Jeanne D’Arc. I’m nothing. I’m No one, surviving.

  She walked, amazed at her own strength. She’d had one cold in two years. She hadn’t eaten meat since before Lyon. The cold seeped into her bones and she walked with it, accepting. I’ll accept anything now. I’m a non-person. Can’t remember if I was ever proud but I’m not now.

  I’ll find this Curé. Get to his village, find him and ask to help, help others to escape.

  Father would be proud. A freezing tear scorched her cheek.

  She walked into Le Rouget. Begged bread, got the previous day’s, a rare delight, and waited for the Mayor. He drove in and she waited in his outer office. Her eyes no longer took in the walls, the notices. Two, th
ree hours passed. As hunger roamed her stomach, the door finally opened.

  “In. Sit.” He offered the last knuckles of a fat red hand.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m from the North.”

  “Who isn’t? Yes?”

  “I need to get to Sousceyrac.”

  “Ohh?” He leaned back.

  She sat back too. Mutual distrust. Natural now.

  “Why Sousceyrac?”

  “A friend there.”

  “Who?”

  There was no point in lying. “The Curé.”

  “Mm. His name?”

  She told him. He folded his hands across his waistcoat. “No.”

  “No?”

  “Gone.”

  She aged suddenly. France gaped before her. Where now? “Need to get anywhere else?”

  “No.”

  “No more Curé friends?”

  “No.”

  “Wait outside.”

  She listened to him phone and mutter. Monosyllabic, deliberate. Fool she was. The Curé was a Jesuit and the Jesuits alone of the Catholic hierarchy had been vocal against the war. Chaillet had been arrested as a traitor. She should get up and walk out of here now. Where? The next village? The phone would catch her.

  “In.”

  She stood.

  “There’s a dormitory for refugees at the Gendarmerie.”

  “And tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow...” he shrugged, blew a dismissive breath and stood half out of his chair and was back to his papers by the time she turned to go.

  She slept in an unlocked cell, with three others.

  Next day she waited. He didn’t come. She slept in the cell again. With two new silent men. They were given black bread and dandelion soup. This Mayor, he didn’t have to find her a place, he could shrug her away. For the fun of squashing her hopes.