Cloudless May (67 page)

“You can say that because you only know one sort,” Mourey cried. “There are others. We have at least ten million traitors, each with his single field, each prepared to quarrel with his neighbour over a centimetre of ditch, only agreeing with him to despise and dislike change. It's charming. Every year it brought thousands of Anglo-Saxons to admire our towns where nothing has changed since Louis-Philippe, our peasants still holding a right of way from Edward the Third of England, the admirable clarity of our ideas, so clear that not one of them told us about the catastrophic change in the rest of the world or prepared us to deal with it. Our famous way of living—strictly bourgeois, sterile, dying. It was childless, and too stiff itself to
defend the country. . . . War or no war, the crisis would have come—and we should have failed.” His voice became slower, much too slow. “And now—we shall have a peace harder than defeat, and a despair worse than defeat. . . . A death harder than death.”

“Despair,” Letourneau said, smiling, “is neither French nor Christian.”

“You priest,” Mourey said gently.

“As you like,” Letourneau said. “But I know that men, even Frenchmen, can be saved by loving them. Plan the most delightful life for them—except, of course, for the rebels!—and they'll spite you by dying out.”

“The Third Republic is finished,” Rienne said. “None of us need worry about it. Leave that to its debtors—of all nations.”

“What comes next?”

“Too soon to think of it.”

“I can tell you what comes,” Mourey said with energy. “A plague of dictators—big and little. No nation, not even Germany, breeds them so richly as we do. Why? Because, for all we boast so much of our intellect, we act first and think afterwards. Luckily, when we begin thinking, we laugh—and that pricks the dictator. Until then . . . There are Frenchmen who never knew what fraternity meant until they began to feel kindly towards Hitler—”

The priest had been listening, leaning untidily in his chair, his big head dragging forward his body. He began to talk without arrogance but with a rough authority—you would have said an honest shabby professor, too honest to do well for himself.

“Jean is half right. We have too many memories which misled us about the future, too many single fields adding up to one jealousy, too many disinterested ideas forming a philosophy of egoism; too much logic, too many good habits, too much clarity. They held a young mask over our age—young, fresh, and, alas, impervious. If defeat cracks it, a young France may astonish the world. I say may—because peoples have died.” He lifted his head—it was an effort. “It is sad when a people like the French dies.”

There has never been a people like France, Rienne thought.

Mourey said with anger, “France can't die.”

He is thinking of his wife, Rienne thought.

“When a people loses its faith in God,” the priest said, “and even in the abstractions its new teachers held up to it—I mean justice, liberty, and the rest: when you have taught them to take everything to pieces, every belief, what have you left them that makes a people of them? The hatred of barbarism and Germany. A day has come when even that has failed you.”

Mourey walked to the bookcase—full of theological works he would never touch. He stood with his back to the room. “In a different sense from the Germans, we had begun making barbarians of our children. I wasn't allowed to teach them that the spirit is more necessary than the body.”

“You wished it, my dear Jean. It was you dismissed God from your class.”

“It was perhaps a mistake,” Mourey said. He would not say more. This was already too much. “I believe in human beings,” he said quickly.

The priest smiled.

Surely it's simpler? Rienne thought. When he is told to clearly enough, the same Frenchman who spends his life counting sous dies without expecting any interest on them, thinking only of handing them, with the house, to his son. . . . He dies. . . . He kills, which is harder. . . . Afterwards he is forgotten, of course—what does it matter?

“This is not the end of us,” he said.

He looked at his watch. His half-hour—and the familiar sense of standing between the two poles, the two clarities, the two idealisms, of the French spirit—was up.

“The end?” Mourey cried. “How could it be? How, if we were put out, would the rest of the world see to read? . . . Suppose the Boches destroy Chartres—there's still Joinville, Villon, Fouquet, to speak for our Middle Age; even if they burn all our Loire's cathedrals and châteaux they can't burn Gregory of Tours, Rabelais of Chinon, Ronsard of la Poissonnière, Descartes of la Flèche. . . .
Non omnis moriar. . . .
Even the Gestapo can't kill writers, painters, musicians, philosophers, who had the good taste to die before June this year. . . .”

“You've forgotten Vigny—at Loches,” Rienne said with energy. “He's still France.”

“You see? You both make your act of faith,” Letourneau said, smiling.

He went with Rienne to the door, and watched him out of sight. Better than Mourey, he knew what Rienne had paid for the minute when he let them discuss his foster-brother. Rienne was walking slowly, almost as slowly as if he had to carry someone.

The sky was dark enough, half an hour after midnight, for the stars to seem close. From here, Rienne could not see his house, but he gave a thought to it and Agathe: she was certainly asleep, she kept her habit of getting up at four in summer and six in winter. All those great names, he thought, names of a town, a province, a poet, Racine, Ingres, Aquitaine, the Marne, are not France. France is some good little nothing each of us is protecting behind the names. For Mourey, it is his quiet Michèle. Letourneau's must be folded in a nothing belonging to that Gontran none of us has seen. And mine? . . . Not worth asking—the answer was always an evening in his garden at Thouédun, between the house and Agathe's herbs.

He turned his back on the village and walked towards Seuilly. The quietness was not peace. In this calm starlit France, the poor humble France of Agathe suffered. He did not, even now, deny his confidence of early May: he withdrew it into himself, into such safety as June had left to any Frenchman.

When, he thought, you have lost everything, when as a child you have slept in the street or a ditch, under the threat of bombs, do you, if the bombs miss you, die of despair? Don't you find, in the ditch or in the ashes of a house, a young confident France, willing to put off until tomorrow the prudence of old age, the serenity of old age? Willing to risk everything today, in the intention of being rich—also today—in freedom, herbs, and a modest little eternity?

Towards midnight Piriac began to dream. He was in Verdun, going up the dark flight of steps, underground, which led from the tunnels to his cellar. He was uneasy. He reached the top of the stairs. A soldier, wearing his muddy greatcoat, formed himself out of the grey darkness and stepped forward. He stood, making no effort to move out of the way or salute, and Piriac struck him. Seized by fear, he was forced to murder the fellow, beating and striking in senseless rage, at last dragging the now shapeless body down the stairs to the tunnel. He began to run; the man he had killed followed him closely, so closely that if he stopped the thing would fall against him. He ran in the darkness, trying now and then to open a door in the earthen walls and escape that way. He never had time, his victim was always too near and he felt the weight of a rotting body on his neck.

He woke, trembling. He remembered the dream, his horror was still in the room, he could taste it. Afraid to sleep again, he kept his eyes open.

His bed was so narrow that he had to lie straight in it. He could have lit the small night-lamp, but that would be to admit his fear. . . . He began thinking of death, a thought which never troubled him in the day-time: most of his friends had died or been killed, his parents had died when they were much younger than he was now, his wife, his only son. They were pulling and would drag him over to them. What chance had he against so many of them, all younger than he was? And not one of them would help him when the moment came. He remembered some words:
Le dernier acte est sanglant, quelque belle que soit la comédie en tout le reste: on jette enfin de la terre sur la tête, et en voilà pour jamais.
. . . A believer wrote that, he thought, with anguish: a man like myself.

He got out of bed with great trouble and stumbled across the room. Feeling about on the wall with both hands, he found the little Saint Joan and took it back with him to bed, pushing it under the pillow. With it there, he felt less solitary. A prayer he had long forgotten—taught him by his nurse, a country woman from the Vendée—came freshly into his mind.

“Blessed St. Anthony, when I am lost, find me; when you have found me, do not let me go, hold me tightly by my hand.”

He turned on his side so that he could lie with a hand under the pillow, and fell asleep. It was four o'clock when he woke again. He felt light and cool. For a moment he thought he was a young man.

He pulled himself up, and sat, an old man in a brown nightshirt, on the edge of the bed. The legs that had to carry his heavy body were the only shrunken part of him. He rubbed them and said kindly, “You have the worst of it, my friends. Cheer up. The order of the day is still: Hold firm.”

He was calm. A decision had been given to him while he slept, he had only to put his hand under the pillow to feel it, as smoothly solid as wood. . . . He was going to defend Seuilly. It was useless—he knew it. Quite useless: the Germans were a sea of steel, wave breaking behind wave, across France. But here in Seuilly were troops who had not fought, tanks, guns; the airfield had not been bombed. For three or four days he would hold back part of the wave, and so long as it was held anywhere France was not conquered. It could breathe—it might even be saved. . . .

He decided to send Ligny with orders to the posts in front of Seuilly. When his orderly came, he had remembered that Ligny was ill—he would be! He sent the man to fetch Colonel Rienne. He felt that he disliked Rienne less than usual this morning; he even found a likeness in him to his friend the Bishop. At the same age, Paul had the same look, cold and a little taciturn. . . . Nowadays, Paul is gentler, no, harder. Why think of Paul? . . . He waited impatiently for Rienne to come in, and when he came, greeted him with the first friendly smile Rienne had ever had from him.

At six o'clock Rienne was on his way to the posts. It was a clear morning, with a kernel of heat. Before he reached the bridge he was forced to abandon his car. The traffic, even at this hour, was worse, a long wedge forced between the houses,
the only movement that arm thrust up from the mass, or this woman squeezing herself between the cars, begging to be taken in. She went uselessly from car to car, as humbly ashamed as a stray dog. Only the boy—he could not have been more than twelve—holding the wheel of a car filled with the women of his family, said politely, “I am very sorry, but you can see there is no room.” Single refugees wormed through, among them policemen, avoiding the eyes of the Seuilly police; an infantry officer and his girl on horseback—the same horse; lost children—one of them was wounded. . . . Rienne made his way across the bridge to the island. Here the wedge was formed of military lorries and guns hauled by caterpillar tractors. A driver shouted, “Suppose we push straight over these animals in their cars. . . .” A company of Senegalese, exhausted, even they, were leaning in the doorways of houses. One of them laughed. “We ought to cut their throats. . . .” The wounded soldier lying behind them, against the wall, said, “You can begin with me, I'm tired of this.” Stooping over him, another said gently, “Nearly home now.” An aeroplane came over, faces were turned up. . . . “A Morane. It's the first of ours I've seen, the war must be over. . . .” Suddenly a jerk. The wedge broke into pieces, and each moved forward as though a string a long way in front were being tugged lazily. Suddenly another block. . . . The heat and the smell of petrol pinned down everything except a mongrel flattening himself under its edge. Suddenly a jerk. . . .

Rienne caught sight of an officer he knew. Lieutenant Flamond was on foot, walking behind a group of soldiers not of his unit. He was covered with dust, even over his eyes and mouth. Rienne shouted, and Flamond forced his way to the edge. He had been fighting on the Seine: he was three days without orders; on the third, he withdrew his men. They retreated in order until the evening when they found themselves struggling in a bog of civilians and civilian cars. He had lost his men in it. His words, he scarcely opened his mouth, had to squeeze as hard as refugees to get past.

“You withdrew without orders?”

“Why not? The Boches knew all about our movements; there must have been a traitor in every battalion headquarters—”

“Nonsense. Don't repeat such rubbish.”

A spurt of rage parted Flamond's lips a little. “What the devil would you have done if you were a junior officer holding a sector, and you knew that the officers on both sides of you were going to pull out without orders the moment things got hot? You would beat it too.”

“No,” Rienne said drily. “You should have fought. If the others were cowards, what difference does it make?”

“And the men? I ought to have got them killed uselessly?”

“How could you know what was useless? Did you know what was going on on the other fronts?”

Flamond began stammering. “You don't know what you're talking about. This war, the officers, the ordnance, the politicians, everything is—”

He pushed his way back into the crowd.

Rienne crossed the second bridge with less trouble. The short distance to Ollivier's headquarters took him another half-hour. . . . Ollivier had been up for three nights. He was drinking black coffee—not, he said, to keep him awake; to calm him. For the first time in his life he was in despair. It made him laugh.