Wars I Have Seen (13 page)

Petain had been a colonel before 1914 and once at an officer’s mess he was listening to all the young officers talking war drinking to war laughing about war and then in a silence they heard Colonel Petain say, And do you think that war is always gay, toujours drole.

Well anyway there was the armistice Petain made it and we were all glad in a way and completely sad in a way and we had so many opinions. I did not like his way of saying I Philippe Petain, that bothered me and we were in the unoccupied area and that was a comfort. Many months later somebody wrote to me and said that in America everybody said that there was no difference between the occupied and unoccupied zone but we who lived in the unoccupied we knew there was a difference all right. One might not be very free in the unoccupied but we were pretty free and in the occupied they were not free, the difference between being pretty free and not free at all is considerable. A great many people complained that France was divided in two but it really was not it was for a very little while and then it gradually began to grow together again, others said there should not have been an armistice at all they should have gone to Africa and continued the fight but that was foolishness there were no industries no anything in Africa except a little food and a very small army, no Petain was right to stay in France and he was right to make the armistice and little by little I understood it. I always thought he was right to make the armistice, in the first place it was more comfortable for us who were here and in the second place it was an important element in the ultimate defeat of the Germans. To me it remained
a miracle and I was always asking everybody why did the Germans grant it, why, it would have been so easy for them to take the whole why did they only take the half, it would have been easier for them to attack England from Egypt than across the channel, why why did they grant the armistice why, it was a puzzle to me and I asked everybody those who might answer and whose answer did not satisfy me and those who could not answer me and with whom I wondered together and those who said there should not have been an armistice but they I was sure were wrong and finally I asked an officer in the army whom I met accidentally and he made it all clear to me.

And this was his answer. The German army always works according to plan and they had planned an arduous and fairly long campaign in France and then an attack on England. In the last war they had been surprised by the strength of France this time they had been surprised by its weakness, but surprise is the important thing to disconcert the Germans any surprise will do if it is a real surprise, and this was a very real surprise. They came along so quickly that they lost their breath and it was going so quickly that they changed their plans, England this year instead of next year as it was intended and so they could not lose any more time so when Petain suggested the armistice they were delighted because now their hands were free to turn back to England, they knew Petain was a man of his word so they were not worried about what was behind them so off they rushed back to the channel. When they got there they found that their material was all in a very bad shape, they had gone so fast that all the plans for keeping everything repaired had broken down everything was used up, it was not made of very good material, as one returned prisoner remarked if the French had only had time to look at the German material they would have seen it could not stand long war, well anyway when they got back to the channel they saw that their armament was not equal to the task and so they had to wait. America came to the help of England in supplying material and by the time the Germans were ready it was too late too late. And
then came the battle of London and it was too late. This is what Petain meant when once he was asked who was winning the war the Germans or the English he pointed to his own breast and answered I.

Between the armistice and the Russians fighting the Germans we all talked and talked and hunted for food, after the Russians began we continued to talk and talk and look for food but there was a difference, all the farmers got drunk with joy the day the Germans attacked the Russians and after that there were more points of view than ever in each one in every one.

We all talked so much and we all explained so much and we all talked to anybody, just to-day the end of October I talked to a man who is in the biggest railway station in Lyon, and he told me that all the workingmen who get leave out of Germany do not go back and they all tell the train-men, all about Germany. They say that three months ago the older workmen, a little sadly said of course the Fuehrer is always right, but perhaps, may be events will be too powerful for him, perhaps, and the younger workmen, were still chock full of certainty and pig headedness, and now after three months of bombardment they all say now we understand, now we want peace, peace at any price, we want peace the eleventh of November, ’43, that is a date, so let us fix a date and that way we will have peace, and they count every day as just being one day less before peace. That is what he told me to-day, and you have to get to know which reasons are founded and which are not, during the time of the battle of London and the attempted invasion of England we found that when you heard persistent rumors coming from quite different sources there was something to it, and we all told each other everything and there was a retired customs officer who worked in his garden and every day we used to talk and we always talked about never who would win, that we always knew, it is extraordinary how many people always knew that Germany could never win, and could tell it over and over again, but the thing we all talked about over and over again was whether France should have gone on fighting when she couldnt
and only the other day Bernard Fay gave me a new explanation. He said the mistake was in going into the war at all. But said I you would have been attacked any way. No said he, Germany intended to take Poland and then attack Russia, and if Daladier had told the English honestly, that they had no material and that the army did not want to fight which everybody knew and that is true we all knew it before the war began that the army did not want to fight and then if the English had answered that this was true then said Bernard, the English would not have declared war, the Germans would have beaten Poland attacked Russia, France and England would have gotten stronger and then when they wanted they would have come into the war. Perhaps said I this is so. That is the point of view of those who said France should not have gone into the war, and so from the armistice on we talked and talked anybody everybody, and there were the collaborators as they were called, but in France there always has been a party that although they know they could not stand the Germans felt that they should collaborate with them. Although everybody was sure that such a collaboration would be sens unique as they said, a one way street. Then there was the point of view of Georges Rosset. He said he preferred that the Germans should win rather than the English, but Georges I said you want your liberty, you know you would never want to be under German control, Oh he said you dont understand, we Frenchmen can always will always get the best of the Germans that is the reason that although they win and occupy us they can really not do anything to us, we can always get the best of them, we always can, but the English, well it is not so sure, not so certain, and I for one would rather not try.

I listened to so many in those days, and everybody’s point of view was so reasonable as they explained it, that is what the French mean by saying they are logical, any point of view they have which concerns themselves is so reasonable when they explain it, they have no prejudices, they have traditions and a way of life and they have a point of view, and they have a reason for it, of course there are some among them not a great many but some
among them who simply want to be on the winning side, anywhere there are lots of people like that, and when they are like that it is simple but not logical, not as the French understand logic and as I understand logic with them.

This present war is so logical as I understand logic so much more logical than the 1914–’18 war, that was relatively simple and you had simple opinions and simple points of view but this war, well there are so many sides to be on all logical and the events in spite of their confusion are so logical, not nineteenth century at all not at all. The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic, and I like logic I really do, I suppose that is the reason that I so naturally had my part in killing the nineteenth century and killing it dead, quite like a gangster with a mitraillette, if that is the same as a tommy gun.

But to come back to what we all thought about Petain. Bernard Fay and the chocolate cake.

Our neighbor’s cousin has just been shot in the Haute Savoie, by a man with a rifle who shot him as he came out between his father and mother from church, and the man then put his rifle on his shoulder and walked away. The man shot was a son of a count, one of the old families of the country poorish but a considerable land owner and was he on one side or the other. There seems to be some doubt. He was an escaped prisoner and some say that he was in the German pay but his cousin says not at all he was strongly anti-German and did not want to have his younger brother join the special police whose business it is more or less to watch their neighbors, well yes or no, take it as so or take it as not so, it is all so mixed, his brother-in-law was killed fighting for the Allies in Tunis, it is all so mixed and her brother and her husband’s brother had intended to betake themselves to the mountains instead of going to Germany but they did not because they were afraid of the long winter. And the man who was killed seems to have been a gentle and defeated soul, among his papers they found one saying that he hoped that if one of the four
brothers, there were four should have to be killed in any way he hoped that it would be he because he had no future. He was just a simple man, and his brothers all were clever and they could have a future. His cousin who was telling us is married to a man whose family all say that Petain is a cretin, and she said she had to suffer that and now she is content that her brother is working in Germany rather than to be mixed up with all of them and even if he is killed by the enemy and she was all mixed up what between those who have betaken themselves to the mountain and those who are communists and Anglo-Saxons who are bombing and friends of Russia and they are suffering from the communists, and what will happen and I always say you can have any government you like but those who take to the sword will perish by the sword and if you persecute you will be persecuted, and yes she says I know, but you dont understand and a friend who was there said that the cousin who was killed had been denouncing his neighbors, not at all she said, the neighbors denounced each other, they were three of them who had been good friends with one another and they denounced each other and then to get friends again they came and denounced his brother who had turned special policeman and this had made her cousin who has just been killed reconciled to his brother being in this special police.

And all the time there is Petain, an old man a very old man and mostly nowadays everybody has forgotten all about him.

Marechal Petain then did save France and saving France defeated Germany and defeating Germany he just had to go on living until the Russians whom he feared defeated Germany and the Americans whom he liked defeated Germany and the English whom he mistrusted defeated Germany, he was an old man and he just had to wait and he spent every day and all day waiting but very actively waiting, he liked to wait and he liked to be active and he did them both at once. And while he was waiting anybody was bound to forget him and while they were forgetting he did not mind it because he knew he was actively waiting and so
actively waiting was a complete action and he did this not because he had it to do but because to do it would do what he had to do.

And all the time everybody around him had so many points of view so many points so many points of view so many things going on inside them in each one of them. I remember some one coming it was in the end of ’40, and they said they had just come from America and they had just seen Marechal Petain and Petain had wanted to know how they felt about him over there and the man answered and said they did not like his persecuting, and he said, as for free-masons I hate them, as for communists I am afraid of them, as for the Jews it is not my fault.

French people do like good fighting, they like it better than anything and though they all are just as afraid as the Marechal was of them it was very funny but even the speaker of Vichy when he gives the news summary cannot help being proud of the Russian fighting, they the French always feel that really good soldiering belongs to them, they are as I am always telling them hopelessly European about all this, they cannot get into the point of America, that fighting consists in putting the other man out of business, there is no use just in going forward or back and using yourself up, it is just the difference between old fashioned dancing and American dancing, in old fashioned dancing you were always sashaying forward and back waltz or polka or anything but in dancing as Americans invented it you stay put you do it all on one spot. Well that is the American idea dont have your armies running all over the place but stay on one spot, bombard and bombard until all the enemy’s material is destroyed and then the war is over, but no European likes that, it is contrary to all their past and it holds for them no future, because after all as I said in Everybody’s Autobiography, Europe is really too small for a modern war, and there are not industrialists they are shop keepers, they could get an enormous supply in advance put away in their warehouses but when it comes to renewing that supply well there is nothing to do it, France does better than most because she at least can produce food, it is a thing which never ceases to surprise
me. How an average agricultural family in France counting a father a mother fortyish and not overly strong with one old mother or father sometimes both but nearer seventy than not with one usually sometimes two children and none of any of them very strong the amount of food they produce during the year is tremendous, potatoes and food for the cows and oxen, and wine, and wheat enough to feed France if the Germans had left it, and oats and barley, and garden truck, and fowls and rabbits, and quantities of it and they go on not very strong and not working very hard, and making hay, and selling quantities and they go on being neither rich nor poor and if their only son does not get killed in a war well then he goes on and they do produce a tremendous amount of food just like that.