Planus (21 page)

That had us puzzled. For my part, I had not yet heard about radar. I knew that there were aeroplanes that jammed radio waves, bristling with antennae which wove a moving curtain of incomprehensible signals round each formation of bombers flying over Germany; I knew all about the asdic, the submarine detector, for I had heard it operating day and night throughout a long patrol in the North Sea when I was aboard a destroyer of His Majesty's Fleet in my capacity as war correspondent, in March 1940. But I was totally ignorant of radar and did not know that, on every raid over Germany, the English aircraft released millions and millions of strips of silver paper precisely to prevent any detection by radar.

'Pass the rum round,' I said to the
patronne,
and to the youngster : 'It's a jolly tale you have to tell, but on the whole it's good news, since you are announcing the end of the war to us, and the defeat of the Boche. Now, young man, this is what I can do for you. Listen carefully, and may God help you! You will leave at

once by the alpine line. There's a train at five o'clock. You haven't a minute to lose, so get a move on. At Veynes, you will go to the ticket office and ask for a ticket to cousin Blaise's place, it's in the Jura. And if the clerk asks where you've come from, tell him from cousin Blaise's place, in Provence. That's all you need to know. And don't be surprised if they don't exactly welcome you with open arms. But it may turn out all right. Go on. Hurry up!'

'Thank you, Monsieur, Monsieur . . .'

'Cousin Blaise, that's all. Do you need any money?'

'No, Monsieur.'

'Good luck, then!'

'Poor young people!' exclaimed Felicien's wife.

'You should have given him some sandwiches to take with him, he's got quite a way to go and he's not likely to sleep tonight either!' I said to the
patronne.

'If they're all like him in the maquis . . .!' said Felicien. 'It's a fact, it's no joke to be twenty years old today. What poxy times we live in!'

Renee was sitting on her chair, humming over her needlework.

'Making your trousseau, my love?' I asked her. Then I bade an abrupt
au revoir
to the others.

'I may come tonight, very late.' I left the Opera.

'Accursed times!' I muttered to myself on the way home.

It was time for the postman.

No letters.

And my eldest son had been a prisoner-of-war, at Ziegenhain, near Kassel in Hesse, since June 1940.

And he never came back. . ..

That evening, I did not go back to the Opera to make sure the fellow had well and truly departed, had not missed his train, or come back by chance to sit at my table.

There was an air-raid warning.

The electricity was cut off.

I lit a candle.

No radio.

Licht! Licht!
shouted the German patrols down in the streets, and the scoundrels fired rifle-shots at windows that were inadequately blacked out or let the tiniest ray of light filter through.

Window-panes shattered.

It was impossible to settle down to read anything, and I began pacing round my room like a prisoner in his cell, like the hundreds and thousands of prisoners at that moment secreted away in the dungeons of the Gestapo, blinded by the electric eye in the ceiling of their cells, poor devils. Their presence haunted me.

There is something magical about it, I said to myself. What with the perpetual state of alert, the blockade, the long-distance raids, the orders transmitted by wireless telegraph, the radio propaganda, these machines that fly above the earth and plunge under the ocean — aeroplanes and submarines — the listening devices, detectors, smoke-screens, factories cunningly painted to disappear into their surroundings or buried underground, with all these tricks of camouflage and ultra-modern machinery, the present war has something of the magic of the Arabian Nights about it, and that is why the English, who have an inherent taste for fairy tale, adjust to it so well and have achieved a total black-out, not only in London, but spreading all over the country from coast to coast, like the evil genie, the black giant who escaped from the poor fisherman's bottle in the story of Sinbad the Sailor.

Suddenly my wizard of a chauffeur wrenched the steering-wheel round. Where were we ? I wiped the window and saw from a signpost that we were turning off towards London. The snow was no longer falling heavily. The last few flakes were drifting down. But a moment later I cried out with surprise. Hundreds of sausages were floating in the atmosphere. They were at many levels, some a few feet off the ground, others high, very high in the air. The nearest ones, glistening and serene, resembled well-fed cows grazing in a field, but the highest ones, held in the clouds at the end of their taut cables, appeared to be restless, agitated, impatient, as if they were ready to break their bonds and take flight. This herd suspended in the air presented a startling and extraordinary spectacle, but a little farther on, at a turn of the road where the car passed in front of a byre housing these unstable beasts of a new breed, I thought I had been transported to the land of my childhood, for the factory where the captive balloons were made reminded me so vividly of my old box of toys, and yet they were a miracle of scientific forethought, and their barrage, tethered in the sky, assured the defence of the cities and ports of England.

Picture to yourself hangars as high as the towers of Notre-Dame, through whose opened sliding doors we could see hundreds and thousands of brand-new sausages, set out in rows like toys in a bazaar, hundreds and still more hundreds of gleaming sausages, varnished with aluminium powder, each one labelled, not with a price- tag, but with a registration number, for these beautiful things were, after all, engines of war, and
en masse
they were threatening, each lodged in one of the cells set one above the other and reaching right up to the top of these corrugated beehives, for the byre was also an arsenal, and each one was alarming, like the sleeping larva of some antediluvian monster or a giant insect belonging to another era; we saw them awakening, the flanks taking shape and beginning to inflate and pulsate like the throat of a lizard of the Tertiary Era who has just lost its external bronchi, and the whole thing had the aspect of a strange and yet familiar beast, as it was extracted from its cell and led out, each at the end of its tether, to come to life in the wind and graze high, very high in the pastures of the sky.

•The French text reads: 'De 1914 a 1939 l'indice de la vie est pass6 de 3 4 5.'— N.R- the speed of cars and aeroplanes, but also the rate at which engines wear out; machine-guns fire more rapidly and big guns have a longer range, but they also use up more ammunition and become obsolete more quickly; industrial output is higher, but it costs more to produce, not to mention the depreciation of machine-tools. You see, only the number of men actually in the fighting-line has diminished, or remained the same, in comparison to 1914, for in modern warfare it takes seven men behind the lines to keep a front-line soldier fed, supplied with arms and equipped with all he needs, but then this slight deficiency in the number of men in the firing-line is largely compensated for by the efficiency and power of the automatic weapons used in the Second World War. . ..'

The Minister was also an enthusiast.

Questioning me about the new war factories I had just visited, he sensed how sincere was my admiration for everything I had seen, my astonishment and stupefaction at the number of secret inventions, and answered me confidentially when I asked how it had been possible to achieve so much in so short a time :

'I have been fortunate in having an exceptional man at my side, a sort of visionary, of the kind who appear only once in a hundred years. He is the Director-General of Royal Ordnance Factories. He is an engineer and, if you take him to a barren piece of ground, where we intend to build a large war factory, he is immediately able to visualize the lathes turning, although they have not yet been ordered from America, and he instantly begins to stake out the plot, indicating the exact spot where the generators and furnaces will be installed, imagining the whole chain of events — the taking over of the power-hammers, the machine-tools, the machinery — which will lead, in stages, to the eventual production of the envisaged factory. If you ask him how long it will take him to build this factory and get it into production, he will say he needs, for example, three months and four days. And if you ask: "Why the four days?" he will answer : "But what's that to you? I need them. Let me have them." And the most astounding thing is that this mathematician never makes a mistake, and, on the appointed date, at the stated hour, the factory starts to operate. Admittedly, the walls are not always finished and the roof may not be on, but the machines roar away in the open air and the rest is totally unimportant, for there they are, on their concrete beds, each one in place and exactly in order as laid out on the first day, when the place was nothing but a wilderness, and, on the specified date, they work, they go into production. The walls and the roof are finished off later. It is a great stroke of luck for me, having such a collaborator, now that we have not a moment to lose and we are all battling against the clock, trying to make up for the time we lost listening to Herr Hitler ranting and raving and secretly offering peace terms to one Allied country after another, lulling them with false promises, only to gobble them up in his own good time.'

'Excuse me, Minister, but may I ask the name of this Shakespearean character, and would I be permitted to publish it?'

'Most certainly,' replied Mr Burgin, CI am talking about my friend, McLaren, a visionary, but also a great realist. "Use the Navy to hold off the Germans, and the Air Force to destroy them from the air," he is in the habit of saying, "but give me time to produce all the arms we need. There will be no shortage of bombs!" I can assure you he is not wasting his time. Besides, you have seen his factories. The German shock-wave will produce a counter-shock and so much the worse for them. . . . McLaren has calculated the effect it will produce.'

The destruction of Hamburg was simply an illustration of this theory of shock and counter-shock.

. . . And that night I heard the roar of the Allied aircraft passing overhead, at a very high altitude, returning from their mission of destruction. The droning went on and on. There must have been a great many of them. I do not know why Aix was their rallying-point, but there they circled for a long time before going back to their bases, swiftly winging back to North Africa, Sicily and perhaps Southern Italy or Corsica. But where were they returning from? . . . Poor France!

Licht! Licht!
shouted the Jerries in the street.

That was exactly the word spoken by Goethe on his deathbed, but, unlike their great man, the bastards down there were not demanding
more light
when they fired their rifles into the black-out.

I relit my candle.

The window-panes shattered.
To you, old pal, old teacher

and old comrade, William S. Kundig

Geneva bookseller

You have earned your cross of the Legion d'honneur a thousand times over, by your love for France, her books and paintings, her cuisine and her wines, her flowers, her chorus girls, her sons and daughters from every province in the land. And you did not hesitate to come and join us, in 1914-18, and carry out certain missions which were not all beer and skittles; again in 1940; and in 1944-5, you crossed the Swiss frontier to strike a blow for the Liberation in Savoy. (I shall never forget the secret cubby-hole you showed me, in amongst your collection of rare and precious books, full of Colts, parabella and submachine-guns, which were sub vitro but had been used in anima vili. What an experience! . . . ) You are my buddy and my brother.

Blaise
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL LIBRARY IN THE WORLD

Like the Loch Ness monster, 'Paris as a Seaport' is another of those subjects that crop up on the front page in the silly season of August, when the newspapers have nothing sensational to report (one cannot expect a local war, much less a war-to-end-war, to be announced every year, like the annual holidays !) and the editorial staff are still on the job, resenting and envying their colleagues at the seaside or enjoying a trip to the mountains, and impatiently awaiting their turn to go away! overcome with boredom, and not knowing what to do with themselves, they beat their brains out and finally succumb to routine (which may seem a paradox in this profession ever on the alert for hot news, hunting for sensation, improvising, competing in the daily renewed battle for Startling headlines), and so, half- asleep in front of a last glass of beer, everyone in shirt-sleeves, wearing eye-shades or dark glasses, yawning, stretching, tipping their swivel-chairs back at a dangerous angle and putting their feet up on the desk, pipes going out or falling from gaping mouths, the entire editing room is overcome by the heat and snores away, sleeping the sleep of the just, in spite of the rotary printers thundering on (while the operators fall asleep on their feet), printing nothing but lies and trivial summer stories and shaking the whole building from ground floor to attic.

Many times I have aspired to writing an article on this theme. But each time I have given up, telling myself that, at the Ministry of Public Works, I would find an atmosphere much like that at the newspaper offices; that is, offices three-quarters deserted, the director absent, the engineers and heads of department, who might have granted me an interview, away on holiday, the civil servants dozing over dusty files in the exceptionally well-ventilated offices, doors and windows wide open, a bluebottle dancing in a ray of sunshine filtering in through a tear on the lowered blinds, and the honourable pen-pushers sweating, unbuttoned, more dead than alive.

Nevertheless, what a delightful scandal I could stir up, and what sticky questions I could put to the officials concerning this non-existent port they have been talking about for one hundred years, and which, apart from the mentions in the newspapers, figures from time to time in official speeches, government declarations, questions in Parliament, votes in the Chamber of Commerce, election promises, statistics quoted to support some argument, discussions of credit at the Treasury; for some time now, the astronomic sums assigned to diverse State funds, the County Council, the Town Hall and the interested local communities, have not been entirely spent on the various designs, blueprints, mutually contradictory projects, economic surveys, chimerical and useless labours (initiated, cancelled, begun again and again abandoned), on the terrain which has been plotted out thousands of times by surveyors and experts, and so the whole thing has reverted once more to the Ministry, in the form of an avalanche of bumf and red tape. But it is also a question of politics and profiteering, a first-class fiddle, and, during the hundred years of discussions, generations of sharks, senators, deputies, councillors, municipal magistrates, land speculators, owners of riverside property and building contractors have grown fat and feathered their nests nicely, not to mention the civil servants of all grades who have made a career out of it and retired at last on a well-merited pension, having defended the prerogatives of the Administration, and seen to it, with laudable vigilance, that this grandiose concept did not spill out of their green files and become a distressing reality — the Seaport of Paris!