Cloudless May (30 page)

The mask must be the man, and the man the mask. Behind it there was only the personal void, sucked dry of the juice of life: outside it, that living Europe, torn, agonised, which Thiviers refused to see. Tell him about yesterday's air-raid on Rheims, and he'll fly off to read an account of the Gauls sacking Rome—which will distress him bitterly. . . . In fact, the least bearable thing about Thiviers was his genuineness. . . . Thank God, he hasn't passed on his dry blood to a child, Labenne thought.

He jerked himself forward.

“Put me down at the offices of the
New Order”
he said impatiently. “I've things to see to.”

Derval was writing about the reconstruction of Europe. He brushed aside the problems that had baffled the makers of the Versailles Treaty, and was shifting boundaries, deporting whole districtsful of peasants, turning the age-old courses of rivers, with his usual enthusiasm. When Labenne came into the room he brought in with him the smells of earth, clover, sweat. He
had a pink clover in his buttonhole. In the second before he came the floor had been strewn with dismembered fragments of Europe: now there was nothing in it except Labenne and a little dust.

“I've come,” Labenne announced, “from an absolutely secret meeting at the Prefecture. Absolutely secret, you understand. I'll give you an account of it.”

He had an incredibly good memory. With his distrust of writing he never made notes, and he could remember the prices fetched by the vintages of the last twenty years, and the size to a yard of every estate in the neighbourhood, and the incomes and private lives of every person he knew. Dried, pressed and labelled, their precious secrets took up very little room. He had only to read a dossier to memorise it. With one exception. If you did him a bad turn he remembered about your malice only its weight: a good turn—and he noted carefully how far he could rely on your weakness in the future.

He gave Derval a word-by-word report of the Committee—with commentary.

“. . . the heavens opened and Monsieur de Thiviers descended, having the moral crisis in his beak. You young fool, you're going to tell me you've prepared several leaders on the moral crisis. You can tear them up. France is always on its way to a moral crisis. They're our speciality. . . . I spit on the moral crisis, d'y'see? And on all the quotations from Messrs. Renan, Victor Hugo, Gide—who the devil is Gide?—which our dear Prefect, our dear commander-in-chief, our dear deputy, lard into their speeches. It's a bad habit to prop yourself up on these illustrious corpses. And don't talk to me about civilisation and the rest of it. From now on so far as the
New Order
is concerned,
I
am our glorious civilisation. And I'm innocent of all these stinking quotations.”

“Monsieur Gide is still alive,” Derval said timidly.

“So much the worse for him,” Labenne said.

He sat down. He felt only contempt for Derval. The young man existed for him as a tool near his hand. With the natural result that when nobody except this screw-driver or paper-knife was in the room with him, his egoism swelled to its limits. There were a few moments when he was able to see France separate from himself, separate even from his family. Very
few. When it was most loyal to him, Labenne's ego absorbed France like a peasant absorbing his five acres; he felt, in his toe or in the only tooth which was not sound, although it was as black as the others, the storm that was going to ruin a year's white wine.

“There are writers who are against war,” Derval mumbled. “One could quote them.” He was embarrassed by the thought of going about naked in future.

“D'y'think I'm a pacifist?” shouted Labenne. “What an idiot! War destroys property, doesn't it? Ergo, it destroys me. There would be something to be said for a war held in another country, I shouldn't weep about houses I don't own—and if we were the victors. But this war—which we've lost, which the Germans have won, which is ruining me—can you think of anything sane or likeable in it? It must be stopped . . . for the good of France. . . . Yes, that's where I am now. And I'm giving you your orders. You'll lard your columns—not with Monsieur Renan, he must be damnably dry now, my God—with melancholy. I want to see old gentlemen crying like calves over their copy of the
New Order.
You'll start a few good stories—no, no, I'll do that, I doubt if you have the right touch.”

Derval had paled. “Then we've really lost the war? It's not only politics?” he said after a moment.

Labenne caught sight in Derval's mind of a flying spark of revolt, of decent defiance, of courage—in a word, of another France, not identical with himself. Of a France in which the Marne did not represent defeat, and the word Paris was not a synonym for disgrace and cowardice. He put his thumb on it.

“You've written a great deal about our political rottenness, haven't you? The need for social revolution and all that. Right. Revolutions are made by soldiers.
Our
revolution is being made by German soldiers. It's simple.”

“What about our own soldiers?” Derval stammered.

“They're the victims—so much the worse for them.”

Derval was silent. Trying to get deeper into his mind Labenne was held up by a curiously formed shadow. Its shape baffled him. He couldn't know that it was cast by an old gentleman wearing a shabby frock-coat, arm-in-arm with another old gentleman in a toga.

“It's not only our soldiers,” Derval muttered. “There'll be other French victims.”

“Certainly. All the people who don't realise in time that we're living in the full light of the German conquest of Europe. Of the world!”

“Is that true?” Derval stammered.

“It's absolute truth. . . . It follows that those who march with the conquerors become conquerors.” He looked coldly at Derval. “You can choose. I'm not responsible for you. D'you want to be victim or conqueror? To be dug under or go on living—in the sun, eating and drinking in the sun? I suppose you have a young woman. Well—choose whether you'll sleep with her or leave it to someone with more of his senses about him. Absent, forgotten, dead—or alive and prosperous? If you choose to rot—I won't stand in your way.”

The shadow across Derval's mind was withdrawing; it had become less dense. You could see through it—what?—images that were less significant for him—evidently, since they were fainter. There was a flicker of trees, perhaps limes; the smooth nap of a river, grey-green and wide, marked with patches of cloud like bruises; but the oddly human, single and not single form had almost disappeared.

“You know,” Derval said slowly, “I'd realised that you were balancing the possibilities of defeat—what to do for the best, if we really did lose the war. And to safeguard your interests. That's merely prudent. . . . I hadn't realised that you think of the Germans like that. . . .”

What a fool! Labenne said to himself. That Derval thought this did not surprise him: he was amazed that the young man could be so childish as to say it aloud. He smiled and said calmly,

“You're very naïve, my young friend. . . . You can talk to me like this, because I know how to value your intelligence”—he made an appalling face—“I advise you to be more reserved with others. And now try to understand me! I want the end of the war to come quickly, because, yes, because it's inevitable. Think! Think of these Germans, perfectly conditioned for war—down to boys of five, unmarried mothers, sterilised half-wits. Think of a nation which can afford to sterilise—because everything belongs to the State, even the virgin's womb. Europe is
going to change its very skeleton. It's true. . . . We had our Maginot. What a farce—but some people made fortunes out of it. Very well, it's finished, and I have ideas for the future. I have a son. You're not going to tell me he isn't the future? And I have my ambitions. . . . As you say, there will be victims. Touch me—do I smell like a victim?” He smiled again, with sudden candour. “And you haven't the face of a victim, either, my child. Nor of a traitor.”

“A traitor?” Derval echoed.

“Certainly. Anyone who advises France to resist a day longer than necessary betrays her,” Labenne said in a cold voice.

Why am I bothering with this fool? he asked himself. The answer was that he had a use for Derval; and he enjoyed using his power over men, especially young men. He enjoyed peering into Derval's mind and seeing there only the light of a sudden conversion. That shadow, that other France, was dissolving, had been dissolved, in a freshly corrosive belief. Just as neatly quicklime would dissolve the bodies of the others, the victims. Poor bodies—weighted with the past, with ignorance, ill-luck, or with a loyalty which had lost its chance. From now on he could write on the wax of Derval's brain what he liked. Of all the Dervals.

He jumped up.

“ I'm ravenous.”

Woerth had been careful not to say at what hour on Sunday he meant to inspect the defences. His theory of discipline was simple and rigid: the fighting man is always ready, always at his best.

He left the barracks with Ligny at three in the afternoon, satisfied that the colonel in charge of the forward defence line had been expecting him for not less than six or seven hours. At the bridge, he dismissed his car in order to walk the rest of the way—another theory: to see his general on foot puts a new heart into the soldier at his best. Walking a few paces behind
them in the blinding sunlight, Colonel Rienne reflected that this theory was like a number of others established by old generals, as infallible, as imbecile. Since the fighting man knows very well that the general is walking for only five and a half minutes, to see what it feels like.

Notably erect, out-facing, in their role of old campaigners, a fierce sun, they were like grasshoppers—military grasshoppers, if you like: Woerth slender, elegant, small; Ligny tall and very thin, with a slight relaxation of his narrow shoulders marking just that degree of scepticism and humanity.

And the silence made itself noticed. The sun pinned to the ground—so that they lay there like the dead—the dog stretched in the centre of the deserted street, and the weak net of poor shabby houses. There was not even the drone of an aeroplane. A long way north-east from here and well out of hearing, a few French aeroplanes went up, survived, landed to suck in energy along the nerve joining them to the ground, took off, landed—until the moment when the nerve snapped and curled up. The airfield a mile to the east of Seuilly was quiet. No flurry there. No war. And it took some minutes of their walk for the war to break into an argument the two generals had begun in the car. Woerth set it off. He said that a man who was living, as Émile Bergeot was, an openly immoral life, was not fit to be in an official position. He would like to eliminate Mme de Freppel. Or get rid of the Prefect. He was speaking sincerely, in so far as disorderly habits, lack of discipline, revolted him. Out of kindness to Rienne, Ligny said that Bergeot had been a good Prefect.

“I suspect strongly that Madame de Freppel interferes with the administration,” Woerth said. “An insult.”

“To whom?” Ligny asked, smiling.

“To a nation at war.”

“Surely,” Ligny said gently, “you exaggerate a little?”

Woerth said coldly, “When millions of men are leading celibate lives, it's damaging and disgraceful for a responsible official, the civilian head of a Department, to sink into an irregular affair. When you get infection at the top, you can't say how far down it will go. They disgust me.”

Ligny shrugged his shoulders. His own life had been as austere as Woerth's. But far from increasing, austerity had
diminished any feeling he had that women are important. For perhaps the first time in his life—giving Rienne the measure of Ligny's affection for him—he tried to calm Woerth.

“A soldier must live like a monk. But a civilian?”—without knowing it, he gave away his involuntary contempt for civilians.

Woerth ignored his remark. “I begin to think that possibly I was wrong to visit her house. I did it entirely for the sake of public order. To keep an unbroken line of military and civilian authority. I was perhaps only spreading infection. The thought shocks me.”

“It's less shocking than her dinners,” Ligny said.

Rienne listened with an anxiety as simple as his logic. Since Émile had no legal wife, Mme de Freppel was his wife: Rienne did not care much for her, but he had adopted her as an intimate part of Émile's happiness; he had assumed—since Woerth dined with Émile at her house—that he, too, accepted the relation as natural and decent. And now what? He knew his Woerth well enough to be certain of this: if he had been dining with Mme de Freppel for political reasons and now feared that he had been wrong, it meant—his heart sank—that Émile's position was less secure than it looked. General Woerth was remarkably sensitive to changes of mood on the part of the future. He was always friendly with the general who was going up, abandoning at the very peak of his glory the one due to go down—before anyone else had picked up the faintest trembling of the air. And he was always right. When the new appointment came through, Woerth had been for some days, or only for some hours, on the winning side. His career in a military sense had been rather bare; by no wish of his own he had usually visited theatres of war just after or just before the curtain went up: politically, he was the greatest of living strategists. . . . Or else he had a genius for omens. . . . Obviously he read a change in Émile's future. Rienne frowned. Impossible to warn Émile on such evidence—as frivolous as the sight of a single magpie. He felt stupid with anxiety. Without knowing it, he fell back into the habits of their childhood, and he was thinking of Émile as the good lively little foster-brother who so easily became terrified and unhappy.

Ligny had broken off the argument. A heavy sacrifice—but he knew that if he began to enjoy it he would lose any impulse
to spare Rienne. He sighed, and began talking about General Weygand. Now that he was Commander-in-Chief and Chief of the General Staff the war would surely go better. Woerth only nodded. He was not going to be trapped into pronouncing for one side or the other, for or against Weygand, until he had fingered the entrails. He said in a grudging voice,