Cloudless May (73 page)

“Good God, don't imagine I'm excusing our Woerths. Woerth's idea of war as arithmetic—do you suppose he would have clung to it if it hadn't been fashionable?—has been fatal. In any situation where he was outnumbered, he would see nothing for it but surrender. . . . My memory is twelve hundred years longer than his. I could tell him that a country, like an army, is more than its numbers. It's a fountain of spirit—if you don't mind the word, of love. Woerth's friends at G.H.Q. forgot it. The Government forgot it. No doubt Governments always do. But if they had known how to call it out, it would have saved them. . . . I don't underrate Woerth. He's an honest Government official, a good office soldier. . . . I'm talking to you too long. It's because this is the last time any of my family can speak. After this, none of them will be able to prefer black honey, or amuse himself by walking about in the rain, or reading a book backwards. . . . They all talked too much and remembered everything they had seen. The silence, the forgetfulness, of the Lignys is beginning. . . .”

“Your doctor warned me not to let you talk,” Rienne said.

“What a brute! And I was going to give you my views on generals. On Piriac—who was at Verdun with our good Marshal . . . I've often wondered in what sense Piriac was at Verdun. I know he was there in the body. His mind was probably back at the Staff College trying to puzzle out the connection between duty and promotion. Seventy years of blameless living will have reached their climax when he meets the German commander tonight or tomorrow. I can't see into his mind—we Lignys have only the eyes we were born with, excellent for watching an eagle and short-sighted with human beings. It spares me the pain of trying to be just to them. I shall continue to the last minute to be prejudiced and to detest the people I have always detested. Not a chance that in a last moment I shall let myself become forgiving, or credit Woerth with his honesty. . . . I detest generals. What makes us really intolerable is that the highest posts are always held by men who could offend nobody—not even the enemy. We have a high idea of ourselves, we believe in the grandeur of our role. Many of us, for good measure, believe in astrology or in running before breakfast. To balance this credulity, we believe very little in our fellow-men. We suspect them of plotting against us, and prefer our own plots. Perhaps a man with an instinct for authority, whose business is killing men, is forced to be jealous and mistrustful one minute and overconfident the next. . . . Forgive me, my dear boy. After all, you're not a general. Your cunning or your rigidity must be flawed, your opinions are not reassuringly mediocre, you haven't made the right friends, you don't give enough thought to agreeing with your superiors. In short, to the disadvantages you were born with, your intelligence and an obscure name, you had the lunacy to add convictions and an indocile nature. I'm only surprised you've got so far as you have. . . . Now you must leave me.”

His voice was using up the remains of his life. Either it was as he said—the Lignys were seizing their last chance to enjoy the light. Or he was wilfully exhausting himself. Rienne had made no attempt to keep him quiet. He was willing to listen until Ligny was silenced, or himself arrested.

“I have plenty of time,” he said.

“You have very little time. Go now.”

“I don't like leaving you.”

“Good heavens, what a thing to say!” Ligny mocked. “You mean you don't like the idea of leaving France.”

“Almost the same thing.”

“Thanks for France! But don't worry. We shall both be here when you come back. You don't really imagine that the Germans can take our place? They are so unamiable. Their scientists have no vestige of wit, their writers no gaiety, their upper classes no manners; their statesmen have never doubted that it is clever to lie and massacre. Every other people commits some of the crimes of Germany, but none with such pedantic arrogance. The world can't really prefer these dull butchers of ideas and nations to our lucidity and our simple omelettes. And they bawl so about the glory of dying—as if it weren't the simplest and commonest of human tricks. They have no modesty. . . . No, no, my dear child, you'll come back and drink the wine of our old vineyards. You'll find me content, almost happy. If I must be silent, at least I shall be enjoying a silence I understand.”

Rienne felt a sharp grief.

“I'd like to stay here a few days. You don't really want to be left alone with the Germans and Piriac.”

“I shan't see any Germans,” Ligny said lightly. “Nothing so trying could happen to me on such a day. Look at the sky, my child.”

Piriac was not in the barracks. After the bombing, he had moved to Mme Huet's château on the edge of Seuilly. As soon as he left Ligny, Rienne went there. He asked to see the commander-in-chief. Piriac sent word down that he would see him in an hour; he was to wait.

He waited—from eleven o'clock until two. When at last he was sent for he found the general in a large luxuriously furnished room. In one corner, the iron bedstead from his room in the barracks. . . . It was the Napoleonic legend: only the content was missing—not easy to lodge in this man who did not believe in France.

Piriac was alone. He looked at Rienne with a blank face. “What do you want?”

“I was not able to report to you yesterday—”

“What have you to report?” Piriac interrupted. “I don't want to see you. Is there something you want to ask me?”

Rienne ignored an impulse to say: Yes, why the camp-bed? With severe respect, he said,

“Yesterday morning you gave me certain orders. Later they were cancelled, but I was not informed. Is it in fact true that Seuilly is to be surrendered?”

Surprising him, the general said slowly, almost gently,

“I must spare people as much as possible.”

Is he genuinely moved? Rienne wondered. He had not forgotten Piriac's callousness with his servant. But there was the legend of his humanity—it had to be given a content of some sort. Why not this anonymous pity, for people who were not necessary to him? It was not hypocrisy. He had realised that Piriac was sincerely and deeply convinced that resistance was useless—and the reason. An old man, his instincts were warning him silently every minute that he could not resist death much longer, and he confused Seuilly with himself, France with himself. In his eyes France was a tired heavy body housing without joy a slow mind.

“Pétain knows me very well,” the general said. “We are old friends, he is sure to send for me. I shall have my place in the better nation we are going to bring up. And you—you will have your duties.”

Rienne said coldly, “Even if I were the only soldier to refuse—I shan't be—I should refuse to take part in a dishonest surrender.”

A gleam of suspicion came into Piriac's eyes, bringing them to life. “What's that, what are you hinting at? A revolt?”

“No, sir,” Rienne said. He knew it was useless to ask another question, but he asked it, to leave a tidy room. “A month ago, you gave me a general order to arrange for the withdrawal, in certain circumstances, of our reserve of tanks. The circumstances are here. So are the tanks. Will you allow me to put the plan into effect?”

Piriac looked at him, bewildered. “There's no time.”

“We have time to send them away, or destroy them.”

Piriac let his head fall forward. “Do you know what day it is?” he said in a grumbling voice. “It's the anniversary of the day I joined Pétain's staff at Verdun. . . . You don't remember Verdun. . . .”

“I remember Joffre's order of the day,” Rienne said soberly.
“Hold on at any cost. Any leader who gives the order to retire will be court-martialled”

The look of dismay and anguish on Piriac's face was momentary; it flashed and went out, after it had lit up for a second a countryside of arid cliffs and misshapen trees. There was only an old man talking drily about his duty. “. . . I'm confident I shall be able to influence the German commander. As a soldier, he will talk one of my languages.” He smiled with an exhausted simplicity. “The other is French—I think I still have a trace of my Bordelaise accent. Perhaps I shall teach him a little.”

Rienne did not speak.

“You can go,” Piriac said.

On his way to the barracks, Rienne decided to make one more attempt to save the unused tanks from falling to the Germans—in either of Piriac's languages. He managed to see Woerth. Woerth listened coldly while with an equal coldness Rienne argued for their destruction.

“You exaggerate the importance of what is happening now,” he said. “I'm convinced that, for the present, our worst enemy—and the enemy responsible for our defeat—is Bolshevism, not Germany. We shall need our tanks here.”

“We shan't be allowed to keep them,” Rienne said. He was vexed to feel himself losing his temper.

Woerth looked at him with a curious interest, as if they were meeting after an incident which had been awkward for them both. He is thinking of the day when he will court-martial me, Rienne said to himself. It amused him and restored his good-humour.

“You don't appreciate the position,” Woerth said. “We have lost the war. Our only hope lies in cutting out of France its moral cancer. After that we can think of defeating the Germans. We're defending, now, the future of the country. Surely you would agree that it must be defended?”

“By honourable means,” Rienne said.

“By any means.”

Rienne was enjoying his calm. This might be the last time he would talk to the other France, to a Frenchman whose patriotism forced him to deny a century and a half of sacrifices and effort and feel a grudge against the hopes and loyalties of millions of his dead countrymen who died in the illusion that theirs was the true France. He said, smiling,

“But that makes honour another word for self-interest. Must we speak German? Neither of us has been brought up to it.”

“I realise that the high command has not the honour of your approval,” Woerth said.

Rienne smiled again. “Because we can't hold France is no reason for not making the enemy pay to the last day for their conquest. And we have an Empire—and a fleet. Surrendering before we are beaten . . . we are betraying France.”

“You're mistaken,” Woerth said coldly. “It is a way, the only way, of saving the real France.”

Rienne gave way to a childish impulse. “Oh, if I'm talking to a politician, I'll be quiet. I know nothing about politics.”

Woerth stood up. Had he had enough of his comedy?

“You can go. But report to me this evening, at seven o'clock.”

Rienne went back to his room. His servant came in with a letter which had been left half an hour since. Opening it, he found an army form; on the back of it Ollivier had scrawled, “Come and die here. Michel.”

It was three o'clock. He must, after all, force himself again on Émile. When he saw him he had not been thinking of England—it was an unnatural thought!—and he had believed, or at worst hoped, that Seuilly would be defended: he had seen no choice for Émile between staying and running away with Marguerite to America. . . . If Ligny is right, I am nearly stupid enough to be a general, he thought: I should have decided on England last night; I should have gone back and
advised him to go there. Not as a politician—he must have had enough of ill-health—as a soldier of the last war, who can begin again. . . . He was careful not to put into words his idea that Émile would need his help to become a soldier. . . .

There was something he had to do first. When he sent Lieutenant Aulard to guard Thiviers's aircraft works he had given him an unwritten order, if the Germans got into Seuilly, to damage the machinery as much as possible before he withdrew his men. He must see Aulard. . . . Turning into the High Street, he caught sight of Lucien Sugny; he stopped and beckoned the young man. Lucien was controlled and pale. He had, he said, tried to see Rienne that morning. “You may not know,” he went on in a composed voice, “that the Prefect left Seuilly last night, with Madame de Freppel. The Prefecture is-full of Labenne's clerks who are taking away letters and papers. . . . Is it too late for me to fight?”

“No,” Rienne said, “not if you leave France at once.”

Lucien looked at him without surprise, and without a word. Rienne advised him brusquely to get to the coast before the Germans, and try for England. It was a little over a month since he had promised Lucien to help him into the army. How lucky for Lucien that he had not kept his promise! Luckier than millions of his fellows, whom he had envied, who would be trapped, he could fight, he could still be killed. With luck of another sort, he could even return to a country he had not lived in as a prisoner. . . . He watched Lucien hurry away, carrying his freedom. Émile—he sent Émile to wait his turn, with Pierre and Marie, until the end of the war, or until the day when to his surprise he noticed that each of them had made his own arrangements to live peaceably with him. . . .

He was vexed with himself for not asking Lucien if he needed money.

Aulard's men were quartered in a garage. As he approached it, an officer was coming out. It was Woerth's P.A., Colonel Stoffel, an officer towards whom Rienne felt one of those antipathies which are a delicate pleasure. “What do you want?” Stoffel asked. “Aulard? I removed him yesterday. He's under arrest.”

“Why?”

“I can't give you the information,” Stoffel said.

His insolence was deliberate; Rienne understood that he was being provoked to say something which might harm Aulard. He said nothing, and walked back to his car, leaving Stoffel the honours of the garage—from which at this moment a sergeant came out with his arm through half a dozen circular loaves, and said, “The German tanks are eighty kilometres away, at La Flèche.”

Stoffel answered automatically, “La Flèche is seventy-eight point eight kilometres.”