Monsieur le Commandant (7 page)

The fever broke after three days.

To the north, the roar of cannon fire drew nearer.

The hordes of refugees continued to stream through town, heading west and south.

From my bed, I could hear the popular songs being played on the wireless in the main dining room. Danielle Darrieux was a regular feature:

On the evening of Tuesday the 11th, we heard the sound of aeroplane engines. Supported by my nurse, I went out into the garden. A bomber was approaching from the south at low altitude. The plane was swerving in distress, long orange flames leaping from its wings and cockpit. There was a crackling sound. The pilot seemed to be desperately searching for a place to land. Night was falling, and I was unable to make out the aircraft’s markings, but in any case I did not see the Luftwaffe’s black crosses on the undersides of its wings.

The bomber passed by in a deafening roar only twenty metres overhead. I thought I saw figures silhouetted against the flames. A stink of burning filled the air above the garden, where we stood with our
eyes turned to the deep-blue sky, still bright in the west, while Ilse held me steady with her left arm around my waist. The plane disappeared from sight, the noise of the engines receded, rose, then receded again. A few minutes later there was an explosion, followed by a brief orange flash to the north-west. Ilse’s grip tightened on my flesh, her shivering body pressed against mine, then she leaned her head towards me and I felt her hair on my neck. I draped my one arm around her shoulders, and we stayed that way for several minutes without speaking. Then we returned to the shed, where Hermione slept undisturbed.

The next morning, the café owner told us that the plane had fallen at La Boulardière, near Orgères, and that one wing had been found as far away as La Brousse. Some locals had gone in little groups to see the wreckage. It was an English Whitney bomber. Five bodies had been found inside, charred beyond recognition. A torn parachute hung across a hedgerow. French soldiers from a regiment temporarily garrisoned in Gacé were guarding the site, where an army interpreter had recovered the flight plans. The plane had taken off from Jersey on a night bombing mission to Turin, in response to Mussolini’s declaration of war. It may have been hit by defensive anti-aircraft fire while crossing the front line. Ilse suggested that in the general confusion those poor Englishmen, who had been coming from the south when we saw them, had been hit by our people, and had turned back in an attempt to get home.

In the following days, a great number of French troops poured in from the west to take up positions in the region and face the German divisions that had overrun the Fontainebleau forest. The 3rd Armoured Car Regiment set up headquarters between Rânes and La Ferté-Macé. We were torn between leaving, and running the risk of being caught on the road in the midst of fighting, and staying at the café, at the mercy of the bombs.

Day after day I put off making the decision until the morrow, while in reality I was savouring my nights of burning intimacy with my
daughter-in
-law. I did not allow myself to touch or even brush against her, in spite of her proximity and my desire, but I felt her warmth, inhaled her scent, and listened to her breathing in the night so close at hand, and sometimes moaning in restless slumber. My heart beat faster when I heard her sweet groans, and I felt my hardened member pulse for her.

On 17 June, with cannon fire in the near distance, a large crowd of locals gathered in the main dining room of the café to hear an important announcement on the radio. At 12.30 p.m., the Maréchal began his speech; his voice sounded oddly weak to me. It’s true that the Victor of Verdun was eighty-four years old that day when destiny decreed that he should be called a second time to the salvation of his Motherland.

A clamour erupted, punctuated by diverse commentary, a few shouts of ‘Long live Pétain!’, including my own, loud and clear: ‘Long live Pétain!’

The speech continued: ‘It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today to lay down your weapons. I contacted the enemy last night to ask whether he is ready to discuss with us …’

Loud sobs rang out on all sides, and when I turned to Ilse, I saw that her German cheeks, too, were bathed in tears.

The Maréchal’s address ended soon afterwards, but the remainder was drowned out in the uproar, and the ‘Marseillaise’ was broadcast on the wireless immediately thereafter. Those who had been sitting rose to their feet, and the entire crowd stood to attention. At that moment, every single person in that café in Rânes – man or woman, young or old – was in tears.

An angry rumbling was heard outside on the square, and we watched as a convoy of French military vehicles overran the town centre in a cloud of dust. A section of 75 mm guns took up position. An officer burst into the café and ordered all civilians to drop everything they were doing and evacuate westward, towards Saint-Fraimbault, or else to seek shelter in their cellars. A decisive battle was about to take place in the area. The café owner’s wife protested that Maréchal Pétain had just announced a ceasefire.

In a tone that admitted no rejoinder, the officer replied that he was squadron leader Jacques Weygand, the son of Maréchal Weygand, that his father would never capitulate in the midst of a campaign, that he had received no order to cease fire, that Pétain was known for his defeatism, and that here the French Army would fight to the very last man.

The captain’s fierce pride reminded me of myself in my youth, and I admired it despite the fact that Pétain’s rise to power had been my deepest wish, and that I was convinced that the way forward he had proposed was the only one that made any sense.

I took Ilse by the arm and announced that we had to leave Rânes without delay. The café owner had parked the Rochet-Schneider in his garage. I settled with that good man, and he and his wife helped to gather our belongings and pack the car. Hermione resumed her place in the back. The 75s deployed at the edge of town began to fire with a
terrible racket. On the square, two wounded cavalry soldiers informed Captain Weygand that a sizeable column of motorised German infantry was approaching, and the captain ordered a young tank commander to go out to meet them.

As we left Rânes in a long, slow-moving file of trucks, cars and carts, from the top of a hill we saw unfold the Dantesque spectacle of a column of German tanks some five or six kilometres to the north-east, moving openly and flying little white pennants. The Panzers drove before them a scattered crowd of refugees, who ran with their hands up, abandoning their luggage, amidst dust-covered automobiles weaving across the fields, units of infantrymen who had fallen back from the failed attempt to cross the Orne, and disarmed soldiers from both sides whom the combatants caught up in the fighting had neglected to take prisoner. Shells exploded in the midst of this vast chaos, fortunately without doing great harm, while the fleeing figures continued to run in our direction as the column of Panzers closed in.

I watched the battle helplessly, mesmerised by the action. To the east, I saw three of our armoured vehicles moving along the groves and hedges, two on one side and one on the other, concealed from the view of a column of some forty German troop carriers. Your helmeted soldiers, clustered at the back of the trucks and unaware of the rapid approach of our light tanks, were singing at the top of their lungs. The wind carried snippets of their song all the way to us.

The three tanks turned abruptly to take the column from the rear. One pulled up directly behind the last truck and fired on it point-blank, sending mutilated bodies into the air. At my side, Ilse let out a cry. The tanks now ran alongside the column at full speed, blowing up the carriers one after the other and machine-gunning those who tried to flee. By the time we came to a bend in the road that blocked our view of the fighting all around Rânes, the entire column of trucks was nothing but a vast smoking ruin of blackened iron and shredded corpses.

We ran across a motorcycle platoon leading tanks to the defence of La Ferté-Macé. Clearly, in spite of the Maréchal’s call to lay down arms, a terrible clash was in the making for the Orne and the Mayenne – perhaps the last fighting of the French campaign. The motorcyclists sped on towards Carrouges, while our car moved off in the opposite direction. Hermione managed to sleep despite all the gunfire, and my daughter-in-law turned to cover her with a blanket.

Later, towards dusk, having found protection behind the lines of the Tenth Army, which continued to fall back towards Brittany with the aim of defending a hypothetical ‘Breton enclave’, with heavy hearts and tear-filled eyes we contemplated in the dying light the vast, dark oceans of the Andaines and Écouves forests. In the distance flames rose from bombed villages: Rânes, Carrouges, Saint-Georges-d’Annebecq, while in Saint-Fraimbault the last of our heroic troops, remnants of the 3rd Mobile Artillery Regiment and the 13th Light Motorised Brigade that had been attacked from all sides, were reduced to surrender.

We resumed our journey southward, for I had not given up on my plan to cross the Loire.

The horrendous spectacle of defeat was all around us. The roadside verges were strewn with abandoned vehicles, the bodywork battered, windows smashed and chassis dismantled, stripped of their wheels, engines and anything serviceable. Some cars bore the scars of German strafing: little oblong holes across their roofs; their seats and banquettes stained with large brown puddles of dried blood. At the side of the road we saw little hillocks of freshly turned earth, topped with a tragic cross hurriedly assembled with branches. Haphazard objects,
knick-knacks
, toys, boxes, suitcases, waterlogged papers, rags and torn clothing littered the ground between carts with broken axles or shafts, ambulances scorched by fire, dead horses with great hunks of flesh torn away, exposing the white ribs, broken-down motorcycles with their sidecars, bicycle frames without wheels, overturned perambulators, empty trailers, burned tyres, abandoned field kitchens …

There were rumours circulating that the Germans had already crossed the Loire; that many bridges had been destroyed to slow the enemy’s progress; that, on the contrary, General Griveaud, commander of the Eleventh Region, had refused to blow up the bridges of the city he had been assigned to defend; that all towns of more than 20,000 inhabitants had been declared open cities by the new government; that the Italian air force was bombing Orléans, Blois, Tours, Saumur, Angers. The localities through which we passed were awash with white flags. In Craon, some sixty kilometres short of Angers, we were
told that France had been divided into two zones, and that the Germans would forbid us from crossing the demarcation line. Our flight, all the risks we had taken, had been in vain. The only thing left to do was to return to Paris.

At a restaurant in Château-Gontier where we stopped for lunch, I encountered someone I knew, Josyane C., a proofreader at my publishing house. The young woman had fled Paris with her mother, a most distinguished lady who would now have to find her own way back to Paris, while Mademoiselle C. was determined to push on for Spain, and from there to join up with de Gaulle, whom she had heard broadcast a radio appeal for the war to be pursued from across the Channel. As the British would no doubt be suing for peace soon enough – they were merely raising the stakes in order to secure better conditions than those to which the extent of our own defeat had exposed us – I thought that this was an utterly unrealistic and even anti-French prospect that was doomed to utter failure. I nevertheless invited Madame C. to join us, making room next to Hermione by jettisoning the empty petrol cans.

In mid-afternoon of the following day we reached Le Mans, now occupied by the Wehrmacht. The tank of the Rochet-Schneider was nearly empty, and we could not take the risk of breaking down in the middle of the countryside. Hundreds of motorists seemed to be in the same situation, and had spread their bedding over the ground in the main square in the centre of town, resigned to camping out in their cars, while a German truck blared Wagner’s
Twilight of the Gods
from a loudspeaker mounted on its roof. The tables and chairs of the café terraces lining the square were filled with soldiers and officers in blue-green uniform, while a few women who had hastened to consort with the victor mingled among them.

The merchants of Le Mans had been cleaned out by the flood of people, and we ourselves had exhausted our provisions. Restaurants and hotels all declared themselves full, and the shelves of the grocers’
shops were bare. The money I had brought with me from Andigny, hidden beneath my clothes (I had taken the precaution of dressing as a civilian this time, French officers having become quite unpopular of late), was therefore useless to us. All that remained was one bottle of red wine, which we shared with our nearest neighbours in the encampment, an American in his fifties and his companion, a young mulatta from the French Antilles. They readily offered us sandwiches, put together with their last cans of sardines and a loaf of bread that the resourceful American had managed to track down at a local bakery. The couple, who lived in the Paris suburbs, were returning from Les Sables-d’Olonne, where, like us, they had found themselves caught behind the new border. I don’t know why, but I told them that I was travelling with ‘my wife, my daughter and my mother’. Old Madame C. seemed to find the improvisation amusing, if a little cheeky; Hermione burst out laughing, and my daughter-in-law blushed. I think that, unconsciously, I wanted to avenge myself for the lie she had told during our skirmish in Rânes. If she thought fit to pass me off as her father, I would get back at her by choosing to call her my wife.

The American seemed to be excessively taken by Ilse’s beauty. He explained that he was a photographer and would be glad to take her portrait. His heavy Yankee accent was rather comical and somewhat mitigated the earnestness of his proposal. It was still broad daylight at eight o’clock as we emptied the bottle and chatted amiably. Soon the negress and Ilse, always sociable, were calling each other ‘Ady’ and ‘Ilsy’. The photographer, who gave his name as Man Ray, associated with a number of prominent Parisians in the arts and letters, such as Jean Cocteau, whom he boasted of having photographed, as well as Picasso and the couturier Paul Poiret. At the time, I thought that I was dealing with an affable mythomaniac, but I later learned that this good-natured American artist, who ultimately returned to his own country, was telling the truth. He was in with the Surrealist group.
We had a rather heated political argument. Man Ray claimed to be an ‘anarchist’ and anti-Nazi, whereas I demonstrated that the Maréchal’s rise to power was the only way to end the prevailing chaos and to stop the bloodshed. As to those so-called Nazis – in my opinion, they were more likely to be honest peasants or clerks whom Hitler had rallied to the flag – who were dining with all the ingenuousness of tourists,
easy-going
and jovial despite the exhaustion of campaigning, at the café terraces surrounding the square while regaling us with high-quality music (the American retorted that he hated Wagner) – now that they had won their fight, had they not proven to be remarkably peaceful, merciful and disciplined victors?

The next morning – after a strange night spent under the open sky in the middle of town – I felt someone shake me by the shoulder. It was Man Ray, who told me in a whisper how he had devised a plan to obtain a full tank of petrol for our two cars. All he needed was for me to lend a hand, in exchange for which he would share the fuel with me. The previous day, he had approached two Wehrmacht interpreters for help as the national of a neutral country, and they had agreed to show him where to procure petrol before anyone else, since the distribution to refugees in the Occupied Zone would not begin for several days. We would first leave the square on the pretext of finding a hotel outside town for my family, who were extremely tired. I also had to bring a blanket along to cover the petrol cans.

I got into the American’s little car. His girlfriend stayed behind with Ilse, Hermione and Madame C. About ten minutes north of town, at the corner of a little side road, my driving companion found the sign for ‘Le Château Bleu’ that had been described by the Germans. The way led to a clearing guarded by a sentry, his rifle fixed with a bayonet. The American gave him the password. The soldier knocked at the door of a gatehouse, from which emerged one of the interpreters, in
shirtsleeves. The young man got into our car and guided us to another, larger clearing, where we found four enormous English tanks that had been captured in Dunkirk and which the Germans wanted to study. Their fuel reservoirs were full; all we had to do was help ourselves! The interpreter left us to work it out for ourselves and walked back to his gatehouse.

The photographer climbed up to the turret and slipped inside the tank. He managed to get the engine started, proving that there was fuel in the reservoir. Then he shut the machine down. I heard a clicking sound from somewhere beneath the thick armour plating, then Man Ray emerged, looking quite absurd in a radio helmet he had found in the cabin. From the turret, he told me to lift up each of the armour plates one after the other. I found the petrol cap. The American came down, opened it and gave it a sniff. ‘First-rate aviation fuel,’ he confirmed. Recalling a length of rubber tubing that had been left in the boot of his car, he handed it to me to siphon off the petrol – first into the tank of his car, and then into the cans we had brought along. Some oil cans had been left beside the tanks, and we filled those too. Man Ray thanked the interpreter when we passed the gatehouse on the way out, and presented him with a bottle of champagne that he had brought from Paris. ‘Ah, Paris!’ your compatriot sighed, and asked for the American’s address in expressing his hope that he might pay him a visit on his next leave. Somewhat ungratefully, my driving companion gave him a false name and address, and we returned to Le Mans in a very jolly mood, laden with a good hundred litres of petrol.

It was noon when we got back, and Ilse threw her arms around my neck. She and the others had thought they would never see us again. Her upset was very real, and I was deeply moved by the tears rolling down her cheeks. I almost began to believe in my lie of the day before – that we were husband and wife. Hadn’t we been sleeping together for the past two weeks? Man Ray, a decidedly skilful liar, explained to the
other refugees gathered around us that we had not found a hotel, but that an old couple living in a bungalow had agreed to rent us two rooms. The lie allowed us to leave the square in two cars without arousing suspicion. I followed close behind the car containing the American and his negress, and once we had left Le Mans behind, we pulled over on a country road to share out our petrol and say our goodbyes. Our friends were heading north like us, but the Surrealist photographer drove like a madman and they soon left us far behind.

We reached Paris without hindrance that evening. The streets of the capital were eerily empty, other than some German trucks. I dropped Madame C. at her home in the Alma district, which was altogether deserted, then drove to Rue Richer, where I intended to sleep at my daughter-in-law’s. The concierge gave her an armful of mail, including a letter from Olivier that had arrived that very morning. Ilse opened it, looking more dead than alive. Her face gradually lit up as she read: my son was in the Orléans sector, neither wounded nor captive, and would certainly reach Paris by the next day.

Ilse beamed at me. I should have shared her joy, but a dull bitterness had taken hold of me. I felt as if I had been brutally torn from a dream – a long, marvellous dream – and forced abruptly to see myself as I really was, a lonely old man.

Old man
– that was it! In Rânes, confronted by those young men who were beating and rolling me in the dirt, my German daughter-
in-law
had managed, in French, to hit the nail on the head.

‘You’ll stay the night with us, of course, Paul-Jean?’ she said, pressing the letter to her chest. ‘Olivier will be so happy to see you, too.’

I clicked my heels. Trying to attenuate the curtness in my slightly quavering voice, I said, ‘Thank you, my child, but I’ll be off. I’m a little anxious about the house, you see.’

Refusing the offer of supper, I hugged my family and set off,
reaching Andigny shortly before the curfew. The decision to move to German time would not be taken until several days later.

My Villa Némésis was intact, as were the others on the riverside, but all had been requisitioned to house your officers. A helmeted sentry prevented me from entering my own house.

I took a room at the Hôtel Bellevue, where I was well known, and went to bed without supper, feeling deep in my soul, and with unprecedented ferocity, how absurd was this world of ours, and how impenetrable the ways of Our Lord.