Celestine (22 page)

It is addressed on one fold with copybook capital initials, but the letter itself is written in the careless hand of a young dragoon (trooper) who is in a hurry or slightly drunk or both. In the big northern towns, wine brought in by railway from the traditional wine-drinking areas was by then down to two sous – ten centimes – a litre: even on their miserable wages soldiers could afford a great deal of it. The letter is headed from Meaux in the Seine-et-Marne, a grandiose but unlovely city due east of Paris which was, and is, a major garrison town of France.

29 October 1873

Dear Sister,

The ten francs you sent me came as a great relief to me. I had some small debts that I couldn't get out of paying at once, seeing as we are leaving on Sunday. Now I find myself totally skint again. I did the whole journey back here on foot. The day before yesterday, I was appointed to a headquarters platoon.

I beg you, send me ten francs more in postage stamps, or, if you can't see your way to sending me such a sum, at least send me five francs. But I promise you that ten francs would be of the greatest use to me, and let's hope that one day I'll be able to let you have them back [
faut espérer qu'un jour je pourrai te les rendre
].

If you see Mother, will you tell her that I am very hurt by her letter, she has misunderstood what I said. And tell her that I will write to her when I get back from this tour on 17 November.

I end this letter by embracing you with all my heart,

Your loving brother, Chaumette, A.

PS. We are leaving Sunday morning, so I hope you will reply post-haste. Here's my address –

Chaumette, au 13ième peloton hors rang, 8ième dragons, Meaux.

I traced Auguste's birth record. He was born in Chassignolles to Silvain-Germain and Anne Laurent in November 1848. He was therefore four and a half years younger than Célestine and in 1873 was rising twenty-five. As you would expect, he appears on the village census for 1856 and 1861, but by 1866, when he was barely eighteen, he is gone, although his father had died the previous year and his mother was managing the inn on her own.

He figures no more in any Chassignolles register. This inelegant little letter cannot particularly have pleased his elder sister at the time she received it; it is not of the sort that would normally become a keepsake. I began to wonder if it was preserved because it turned out to be the last communication from a soldier who did not live to come home. The Franco-Prussian war was over, but skirmishes continued till late 1873 on the ceded territory of Alsace-Lorraine and round Metz, and a large number of men were still with the army.

The call-up for military service directly affected only a minority of Frenchmen for much of the nineteenth century, but it played a very important role in the collective imagination. Men were taken from all over France, speaking different
patois
and with varying customs, and were, in theory, summarily transformed into standard French citizens. It was due to military service, as well as to the great machine of French national education that was also getting into gear, that the concept of La Patrie was gradually being imposed on that of the
pays.

But those actually conscripted were far from being a representative sample of the general population. Napoleon had introduced the system of drawing lots, and only those drawing a number low in proportion of the total (
les mauvais numéros
) were called to serve, usually about one quarter of the manpower available. In intention, this was a most egalitarian method. But in practice the intake was unbalanced by the substitution system, which flourished for two generations, till it was swept aside by the Franco-Prussian war and finally abolished by the new Republic. ‘Substitution' meant that when a boy drew a losing number his family was allowed to pay, if they could, for another to take his place. Célestine's cousin probably had this in mind when he wrote to her: ‘I know I haven't yet taken part in the draw, but you mustn't be bothered about that.' The result was that, for much of the century, about a third of the army consisted of bought men – ‘the poor, the landless and the roofless', as a commentator on the quality of the troops sniffily remarked. ‘Selling' a boy to a wealthy neighbour was often the only way a poor peasant family with many mouths to feed could get its hands on a sum of money for some badly needed purchase, such as a new cart or iron harrow. The going rate for decades was five hundred francs – a fortune to those who rarely dealt in money at all.

But most families, at every social level, did not want their boys to go. It was resented that the Government, who arbitrarily removed a much-needed worker from the family farm or business, paid no compensation. The standard length of service was five years for much of the time, seven between 1855 and 1868. The families feared, with good reason, that after being so long away, learning to play cards and drink wine and quarrel and go with strange women in cold, dirty towns, their sons would be lost to them for ever. Indeed, that was part of the Government's intention – to acquire an experienced force of men habituated to army life and untrained at anything else so that they would re-enlist as volunteers. Middle-class families and prosperous peasant ones began to take out private insurance against conscription, as against fire, flood or hail (the Mutuelle de l'Indre company organized one such scheme in 1863). Other fathers went deep into debt to buy a boy out; some close-knit Communes organized whip-rounds to help deserving cases.

And yet, for all it was dreaded, the
tirage
(the draw) was a time of celebration and masculine bonding. In the Berry, those whose numbers came up would march in formation to the local market town dressed in clean white smocks with ribbons in their hats, a home-made banner carried aloft. At the end of the day, the ones who had been passed fit for service were fêted in the local inns and joked loudly that they had been passed ‘fit for marriage – fit for the girls', while those who were ‘too small' or who had ‘bad chests' or some other infirmity made themselves scarce, feeling humiliated. The classic song of the recruit on his way,
‘Je n'en regrett' que ma Rosalie',
tells a different story from that of traditional peasant attachment to the family soil. When Rosalie suggests to her sweet-heart that her own father might help pay for a substitute, she is told by the departing boy: ‘They won't find another fellow as big and strong to take my place.' Some twenty-year-olds, sick of a life where they never encountered a face that was not known to them, or that, more significantly, did not know
them,
must have been eager for a world elsewhere.

I felt that Auguste Chaumette might well have belonged in this category. It took some perseverance to establish the facts of his military career. Having traced the French military archives to the redoubt of Vincennes, I had difficulty in supplying the precise indications to have his record looked up: his writing was so bad that neither I nor several French citizens whom I consulted could decide at first to which company of dragoons he was attached, and there were twenty-six companies. It was suggested at Vincennes that I look up the local recruitment lists in the Châteauroux Archives for the year 1868, when Auguste reached the key age of twenty, to discover whether he had drawn a low number then and, if not, that I search the lists for 1870 when the war began and he was likely to have come under the general call-up. However, this apparently simple course of action proved not to be so: the rule, I was told by the staff in charge of the Salle des Archives, was that all military records were classified as secret for a hundred and fifty years after the birth of the soldiers concerned. Auguste had been born five years too late: to see if his name figured on a public list I should have to wait till 1998.

Since, in the same Archive, I had been free to consult census returns a mere thirty years old (in England and Scotland they have to be a hundred years old) the military authorities' concern for the privacy of long-dead individuals seemed to me excessive. The most sympathetic lady clearly thought so too, but endeavoured to make it seem reasonable.

‘It's because matters to do with health sometimes appear on the military lists, you see.'

‘You mean, someone might object to my finding out that their great-great-great-grandfather had flat feet?'

‘Well, or tuberculosis. People might not want it known they had had that in the family…'

‘After five generations?'

‘I know. But you know how people are about their own family…'

I laid further siege to Vincennes who, fortunately for me, seemed to interpret the rules rather differently. Eventually a decision was taken on the regiment number and I got an answer. It turned out that in looking for a conscript and a possible death in battle I had not been quite on course. Chaumette, Auguste, it appeared, had escaped the draft in 1868. But in 1870, when the Germans invaded France, he joined up of his own accord.

The events in the north-east took their time to penetrate the
Écho de l'Indre,
but by 19 August they had ousted from the front page the pressing local issue of the summer drought. Stories about ‘Prussian atrocities' appeared, a foretaste of the propaganda machine of the future, greater wars. The previous summer, and the one before, the big story had been the local celebration of the Emperor's birthday, a display of servile adoration and piety complete with fireworks, and special prizes to children who were dutiful to their parents (‘They have the right to decide your Destiny'). This year, however, the birthday went unnoticed – in fact the Emperor was soon to be deposed.

The paper carried rumours of local lads being among the casualties: firm news was still slow to arrive then; army practices were in this and most other ways unchanged since the times of the earlier Napoleon. Young men previously excused from service, married men and those on the reserve list were warned that they might be ‘called to the colours'. Substitution had at last been abolished under pressure of circumstances, and all were told to present themselves in La Châtre at seven one September morning along with the ‘class of '70', the current twenty-year-olds. Those deemed not too short, tubercular or otherwise unfit were formed into rough ranks. They marched in a cheerful, undisciplined way to the sound of bagpipes the twenty-three miles to Châteauroux, where the realities of military life took over. George Sand, old now, saw them pass the gates of her manor as she had seen the troops of Napoleon's
levées
pass in her childhood.

However, by then many men had already enlisted voluntarily, swept along on a wave of new patriotism or perhaps reflecting that if they jumped before they were pushed they might do better for themselves. Auguste Chaumette had volunteered on 15 August, a traditional religious holiday and the day that the state of war became official. Five days later he was ‘in Africa'.

This at first sight seemed so implausible that I wondered if the brief record I had been sent had been miscopied. Why, in the very fortnight when soldiers were being rushed from the colonial garrisons to
la métropole
to take part in what turned out to be the rout at Sedan, had this recruit been sent in the opposite direction? Expert advice, however, suggested to me that this was in fact a classic example of the ponderous workings of the French army at that date. (The Prussian one was far more efficient.) Auguste had apparently elected to join the Zouaves, an infantry regiment who did fight in France but whose headquarters were, as their name suggests, in north Africa. At that date this meant Algeria, since French hegemony over Tunisia and Morocco came later. So, willy-nilly, to Algiers or Mers el Kebir, any new Zouave was sent for basic training, regardless of other factors.

The Zouaves, who wore an ornate, Arab-inspired uniform, were a largely colonial company; just why Auguste joined them must also have a logical explanation, or at least a consistent one. It would have been an improbable destination for a young man enlisting in central France, but the very fact that he was in Africa already by 20 August shows, given the communications of the period, that he cannot have been coming from his own
pays:
the various stages of the journey would have taken far longer than five days. He must have enlisted much further south, most likely in some seaport such as Toulon or Marseilles. The Zouave regiments were regularly stationed there, and would have been a natural choice for someone who was in the area already.

Things begin to fall into place: his army service does not account for his being absent from home already by 1866, when his recently widowed mother might have been expected to need his help to run the inn. Indeed, being the son of a widow was often a good reason for getting excused from service altogether. So it seems that before he had even turned eighteen Auguste was elsewhere, and it would now appear that ‘elsewhere' was the Mediterranean coast, a far more exciting place for a restless youngster than central France.

On 9 September 1870 he moved again, but simply to another Algerian depot: he was transferred to the Chasseurs d'Afrique, a cavalry regiment. Presumably this more glamorous option was his own choice and he was familiar with horses: as an innkeeper's son, attending to the mounts of passing trade would have been one of his earliest duties. Perhaps, however, he was unconvincing as a rider, for he was returned to the Zouaves in January. At that time, far away in France, Paris was undergoing its winter of siege and the Prussian capture of Alsace-Lorraine was being bitterly contested. Auguste missed all that. He stayed in Africa till late September 1871 when, according to his record, he was
renvoyé dans ses foyers
– literally, ‘sent back to his home hearths' or back to his people.

Maybe he did go home briefly, but we know that he did not stay. The records seem incomplete here, for he evidently remained in the army: two years later we find him writing to his sister from Meaux, having metamorphosed into a dragoon. He had apparently paid his family a recent, not entirely happy visit: ‘I did the whole journey back here on foot … If you see Mother, will you tell her I am very hurt by her letter, she has misunderstood what I said…'