33 Days (6 page)

At a bend in the road surrounded by brush fifty meters from an isolated house, we stop again. My wife and Andrée F. get out of the car to relax and, without much hope, to ask the inhabitants of the house whether any bread or milk might be found. I stay behind alone, resting against the steering wheel, enjoying the silence. Evening is falling; the light is sad and soft. I don’t know whether I’m drowsy or meditating. Suddenly there’s a crackle of machine-gun fire. I don’t know exactly where it’s coming from. It is nearby and raking the ground. Every note of this symphony of clacks is distinct despite the speed of its cadence; each has its full resonance. It was as if the entire space had contracted to a single point and exploded into clatter. I see nothing but the back of the tumbrel and the empty roadway. I don’t have time to contemplate for long. Mortar rounds coming from I don’t know where are exploding I don’t know where. The lead carthorse I’m attached to rears; the second does the same out of politeness. And with that, they bolt. Should I confess that in an instant I forgot about my wife and Andrée F.? My shock at the first bursts of machine-gun fire was no doubt fear. But I’m no longer afraid. I’m being pulled by a force over which I have no control, to which I am, what can I say? directly tied, attached by a rope. It was so unexpected and quick that I hadn’t time to feel afraid. It was irresistible, like a fall from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame must be. And, it must be said, the exodus had been dull, like trench warfare was, dull and monotonous. In the trenches in 1914, boredom predominated over death. I’m aware of the simplistic lyricism of this, which resembles a battle painting and those games children invent, when they tie improvised wagons and chariots together. All the more so as the first horse, its front hooves seeming so light suspended in the air, rears with an enthusiasm inspired by historic paintings and equestrian sculptures. He’s not rearing anymore; he’s galloping. We’re flying. It has been a long time since I moved so fast. I feel as if I’m part of some cavalry charge in the battle of Reichshoffen.

My natural caution kept me from relishing the frenzy for long. I steered the car into the last vehicle of a stopped column. My front fenders locked with its back fenders. Dead stop. The rope had broken.

Ahead of me the wagon was moving at great speed. It plunged into the roadside ditch and I saw the lead horse lying on its side at the edge of the roadway.

I get out of the car, whose front end is pinned. Behind the car, a dead horse. It is one of an artillery van’s horses that, without my hearing or feeling it, had collapsed, smashing and partly ripping away a fender. When, how had it fallen? I don’t know. What projectile had hit it? I have no idea. Its head lies on the road, jutting toward the middle, where a trickle of blood is spreading. The car cannot be accessed by someone coming from the farmhouse without stepping over the horse’s head.

My wife and Andrée F. had barely left the car when German soldiers lined the roadway and, firing at the machine gunner, closed the road to Lorris to the French artillerymen and the civilians mixed in with them. The two women take cover in a field where two Germans are extending the line of riflemen. One of the two stops firing and signals the women to take shelter in a little wood at the left of the field. And he says to the other in French, yes, in French, and quite good French: “Don’t shoot … there are too many women and children …”

But the little wood is far. The two women run as far as a ditch where some people, women and children, are already crouching. Two other women, as if reciting litanies in a chapel, endlessly repeat aloud, “Saint Christopher … pray for us.” An artilleryman hides himself among the crouching and kneeling civilians. But the ditch isn’t very deep. Their backs are exposed. My wife and Andrée F. take cover beneath a small van. But their legs are exposed, and they feel stones, as if fired from a slingshot, ricocheting at their feet. My wife feels a burning in her calf. It’s no more than a small, bleeding wound, where a sliver of metal has lodged. But two artillery horses are down, and their bodies, screening the bottom of the little van, are protecting my wife and Andrée F. from gunfire.

That was in the space of a few minutes. My wife is worried about me. She is sure that, dragged by the horses, I have been crushed beneath the car. Andrée F. quickly reassures her.

My wife emerges, crawling. Night has fallen. In the darkness some
of the wounded are collected; they are helped into automobiles and carts, which make U-turns and speed off in the direction of Lorris.

The Germans are still shooting, but they don’t seem to be aiming at the space between the road and the farm. A French artilleryman, wounded in the leg, is limping, leaning on my wife’s shoulder, toward the farmhouse.

I don’t know how we found each other again, near the car. We have just sat down when some Germans appear, Indian file, in helmets and armed with machine guns. They are coming not from the direction of Lorris, which is to say from Paris, but from the direction of Ouzouer, which is to say from the Loire. Not only had they caught up with us, but they had also passed us and were doubling back. They had simply overtaken us by traveling through the woods.

They are walking five meters apart. They pass near the car. Never during the war of 1914 had I seen Germans from this close except as prisoners. None are the fleshy German type, grossly made. They look at us while passing. We look at them, too. Later, my wife said to me, “I couldn’t believe they were Germans; they looked like Japanese fighters to me …” This poetic logic was accurate. Their features are contorted, taut. Their wincing makes them look Asian below the helmet. This is understandable. They are afraid, and they push on. This mixture of worry and resolve is, strictly speaking, military courage. They push on, and nothing impedes them. They are no doubt as astonished about it as I am. They are no doubt expecting some trap. They number no more than about thirty. The column halts. One of the soldiers stops in front of the car door. His face becomes visible, framed by the window. This face-to-face, this proximity, is uncomfortable. And this discomfort goes beyond worry or fear. I have the urge to kill this man, or to talk to him about the weather or his health. My wife murmured a few words I don’t recall, to ward off silence, or death. Rather stupidly I tell her, “This man has no desire to kill us.” For a few seconds the three of us form a group at the margins of the war. Perhaps even some fleeting sympathy passed between him and us like a ripple on water. And it seemed to me that the shadow of a smile glided across his clenched features.

Guarded by two German soldiers, a number of civilians are assembled on the roadside. Their hands are in the air. On a signal by the Germans, their arms are lowered. But a young man with a mournful face obstinately raises his arms higher with a distorted gymnastic motion, his open palms facing the sky. No doubt he’s thinking that an excess of caution can’t hurt, and no doubt he’s afraid lest the Germans imagine he has decided to die fighting. It’s sad and funny. At last, one of the soldiers, his hand exaggeratedly patting the air, reassures him: “Enough … enough.”

A few women are gathered between the front of the farmhouse and an impassable line of two helmeted Germans. Perhaps the women can no longer bear their mute, paralyzing fear, their anxiety over a danger no longer associated with noise. As for what comes next, I can’t pretend to explain, only recount. At this moment, the women raise their arms. I don’t know whether they conferred or whether the cry rises spontaneously from their throats. At any rate, they are whimpering more than shouting: “Search us! Search us!”

Do they mean to say that they are not hiding any guns under their skirts; are they offering the conqueror the money or jewelry they’re carrying to appease him? Is it a simple plea, a cry to ward off evil?

One of the Germans regards them coldly and says in French, “You are female prisoners … you will be subject to the same fate as German women …”

This “you will be subject to the same fate” has something solemn, ridiculous, like a grammar exercise. And its meaning seems obscure to me. Are these peasant women being threatened with harsh Germanic discipline or are they being reassured, persuaded that German women are not so unhappy after all?

Fifty meters on, toward Ouzouer, some French artillerymen are gathered close together forming a human bundle, an opaque and shapeless mass.

The women huddled against the farmhouse wall yell to them, “Surrender! Surrender! There are children.” An unnecessary request. All at once, as much by clear decision as from fear, they raise their hands.

I don’t value military courage much, but I felt shame. This was the
only time, in my whole life I believe, that I felt a personal military passion, a desire to fight.

I am recounting what I saw and what I felt. I’m not attempting a historical reconstruction or an after-the-fact narrative, coherent and critical, of military operations. At these moments I knew nothing about the whole in which this incident has its place. Watching from the farmhouse wall, believing myself to be a prisoner, I couldn’t even tell whether those artillerymen who had so little fight in them gathered there like a troop of lost dogs, whether any officer were with them, whether they even form a military unit. I don’t know whether the nomadic infantrymen on the roadsides and the fragmented artillery convoys hadn’t received an order or an example that, in plain language, could only be translated as, “Bolt whenever you want, whenever you can, and block up the Loiret …”

The Germans and the artillerymen prisoners have hardly left when a few horse-drawn French artillery caissons arrive. A hidden unit of Germans fires on the convoy. The towrope of a gun carriage at the end of the convoy comes undone, the caisson teeters then falls into the roadside ditch. An artilleryman runs to the horses’ heads, others put their shoulders to the wheels. An officer takes the place of the man holding the bridle, lifts the head of one of the horses and gives it some support using the bit. All this under fire.

But the women near the farmhouse wall, as they did earlier, shout at the officer and his men, “Surrender! Surrender!”

“We have nothing to do with civilians …,” the officer, a young lieutenant, responds.

The women are shouting, but their shouting is only a lament. Their fear, a tantrum of fear, makes them shout and prompts this extraordinary ellipsis: “Cowards … cowards … surrender.”

The men are leaning into the wheels, bracing themselves against the ground; the horse rears one last time convulsively, comes down again and, exhausted or hit by a bullet, collapses on its side. Only then do the artillerymen abandon the effort; that’s how, that night, honor was preserved.

It’s now pitch-dark. The officer and the artillerymen approach the farm. I was told that an old peasant embraced them.

The officer asks us where the Germans came from and in which direction they left. They’re nowhere to be seen. They hid in the woods and advanced toward Ouzouer.

Despite the darkness, I make out the handsome features of a firm, kind face. I was concentrating only on giving him information, but I too wanted to embrace that young man, who may have already known that all was lost but who wanted to lose nobly.

I have recounted these events piecemeal, disconnected from each other. A little more geography perhaps might have made it clearer, but more like a report, slowing down and further distorting the narrative. It would have been clearer still if I took into account what we discovered later: that is to say, that the Germans knew the terrain perfectly, as well as the size, route and distribution of our convoys. Moreover, a raw transcription of events is impossible. Event, emotion and opinion comingle. However faithful a report might be, it gives a beginning and end to what has neither, and transforms it into theater. It explains and rationalizes an event that is accompanied by neither commentary nor explanation and has no concern for rational justifications.

When the shooting stopped, when the evening silence came, I felt a sort of absurd satisfaction. During the 1914 war, during months in the trenches, I saw nothing that as much resembled war as it appears in legends and images.

Today I have difficulty imagining what we understood of the military situation, the distance we assumed was between the bulk of enemy troops and us. I think we very much believed in a vanguard of motorcyclists or even parachutists, dispatched like cavalry scouts in the old days. The way at the beginning of the 1914 war we had seen innocuous patrols of uhlans. We had no idea whatsoever of the total breakdown of French forces. We assumed they were awaiting the enemy on the far bank of the Loire. And all the convoys that had overtaken us could only have one mission: to reinforce resistance at the Loire.

Witnesses to the unbelievable chaos, we were not assessing its effects. This exodus, this mélange of soldiers and civilians, city people and peasants, suddenly appeared before us like the acute stage of an
illness, like a storm. An absurd hope was born from a no less absurd, almost instinctive logic, from a bizarre denial of the evidence. It was impossible that nothing had been planned for the end point of this rout. This rout was itself proof that the high command had taken other measures. Its negligence here was proof of its vigilance elsewhere. And who knows whether the Germans, who were gaining on us, who were at our heels, had not been pulled into a trap? Perhaps they would be taken prisoner? We were convinced that we could be captured, but not France.

We enter the farmhouse. It is filled with an unrelated group of people: apparently peasants and city people traveling on foot, caught in the violence. The farm is abandoned; its inhabitants have left. Some old people are seated on a bench behind a table. On a bed in the back a wounded soldier is laid out; he had been hit in the arm and near the heart. He’s bleeding. He’s not responding to questions. It’s unclear whether he is about to die. An old woman, an octogenarian at least, sitting on a chair in a corner, thinks only of getting up to go for a little walk along the road. Her family watches over her with indulgence and firmness. She rises halfway and points out to me the wounded man on the bed, which is obscured by people wandering around the room: “I would like to know how that young man is doing …” I find a spot on the bench, lean my elbows on the table and sleep.