Celestine (35 page)

And I am sorry that he can never have known the extent to which our son, now grown up, has internalized him as one of those fondly remembered, larger-than-life figures from childhood, as permanent and mythic in his way as the fabled grandfather. ‘Ah, Monsieur Bernardet would have known,' we say regretfully to each other each time we want to know something.

‘My grandfather, now, he could have told you' – how to mend a gate or prune a vine or deal with a hornets' nest; or whom to approach with what offer to buy another segment of land; or who owned each field fifty years ago or why the earth is red near La Croix Pendue …

*   *   *

Although the accelerated exodus from the land did not make itself apparent till well after the Second World War, the idea persists that the previous war, with its social and human destruction, marked the real beginning of this trend.

By chance, and the way the generations fell, neither the Bernardet family at one end of the social scale nor the Pissavy-Yvernaults at the other were among those wrecked by the First World War. But in a wider sense not a household in Chassignolles remained untouched by it. The Government's obsession with the need to put a large force on the battlefield without delay to counter superior German numbers meant that men of all ages were called up in haste without consideration of other needs, even national ones. Again and again tales of that war recounted today by those who were children then dwell on fields left unreaped or unsown, on workhorses summarily requisitioned, grain unmilled, vines unpruned, cut timber left to rot. For four years it was women, children and old men who struggled to keep the farms going.

This was especially hard when an extended family owned bits of land scattered around the Commune of Chassignolles and in neighbouring Communes. Denise Bonnin recalled for me that her family had owned a potato field some five miles distant – the land at Beaumont. At the age of thirteen she was sent to stay there at a cousin's house to dig up the precious potatoes; her father would come and fetch her home on Sunday. She had the whole field harvested by Saturday evening and decided to set off home alone: ‘So as to be there all day for Sunday. But I wasn't even quite sure of the way, and nor was the horse. We hesitated at every crossroads and I had to walk, leading him. The only human soul I saw on the way was the baker on his evening round. I was beginning to wish I'd never set out. It got dark and I was afraid. I thought perhaps my home and the village had disappeared, gone by magic … I didn't begin to feel a bit better till I came to the lane round the back of the Domaine and recognized it. Then, when at last I got home, the shutters were all drawn and the door locked. My parents had gone to bed. I had to bang and bang. They were amazed when they realized it was me, and not very pleased. But they did get up and help me unload the cart.

‘And in the end my poor brother-in-law never did come back to our farm. He was killed, and brought home after the war in a lead coffin as my sister had died too. Our parents took on my little niece – she was brought up in our house like a younger sister to me. When we used to take her to the cemetery, she would scratch at the earth saying she wanted to “see Maman and Papa”.' Denise Bonnin said this with horror in her voice.

‘Our parents never really recovered from that war. After that, they were old.'

Even when the father, husband, son or son-in-law did return safely to the household, loss still pervaded the air, creating the feeling that nothing would ever be quite as before. Everyone in Chassignolles was mourning, at the least, friends, a godson, a nephew or a cousin. There was also the sense of the absent unborn, those children whom the young men had not lived long enough to father and who loomed so large between the wars in the French imagination. If the ‘missing generation' had been there all, seemingly, would have been different. The drift from the land would paradoxically have been less. Perhaps, even, the ancient cults centring on decorated bulls and dances at wayside shrines would have survived. If so many men had not been slaughtered, perhaps country girls would still have believed in tying good luck charms to trees?

From the whole of France, one and a half million died at the front. Something approaching one million had died in the much longer Napoleonic campaigns of a hundred years earlier, but although the dreaded
levées
of that war had passed into folklore, the slaughter of individuals had vanished from living memory. Chassignolles, like the rest of France, was quite unprepared psychologically for the new loss. ‘The newspapers kept writing about “victories”,' a very old man who was a teenager then remembers. ‘But what we heard all the time was “So-and-so's son has gone. And the So-and-sos have heard their boy's reported missing.”' In France, the telegrams from the military authorities went not directly to the families, as in England, but to the Mairie of the Commune where the dead or missing soldier's next of kin was living. It fell to the mayor (Ageorges at that time in Chassignolles) to visit the families in person with the news. ‘So people dreaded seeing him coming, poor man.'

There are many entries in the Minute books, particularly for the early days of the war, concerning councillors absent, ‘called to the flag'. But though the handwriting of the Minute-taker keeps changing, I don't think that any councillor was in the end killed. They would have been mainly middle-aged men, likely to be deployed in supply lines or at base camps, and often released to return to their socially useful civilian occupations if the Commune insisted hard enough. It was a different matter with the young, who were sent straight to the front. Sixty-six men died from Chassignolles, almost one in ten of the entire male population, but the proportion of deaths among those aged between twenty and thirty was far higher. Out of one group of nine who had gone to the village school the same year and were called up together in 1914 at the age of twenty, only one was still alive at the end of the war: Marcel Yvernault, the son of the inn. In this light, his father Ursin's generous treats of wine and oysters for other young soldiers going off to war take on an extra poignancy, but at least the gesture to propitiate fate seems to have worked. This son lived, to become the father of Suzanne Calvet.

One who did not come home was Anatole Gonnin, the eldest of four boys all born in the 1890s to the family who were then tenant farmers at Villemort. The old miniature castle had descended to country uses: hay was stacked in its medieval chapel and on its Saracen staircase hens hopped. But the Gonnins were a respected family, even if they were not the equal in property of the Graizons, who were established on the one-time Charbonnier property at Le Flets. Villemort was so isolated, except from the new railway line through the wood, that by field paths the Graizons were the Gonnins' nearest neighbours. In the summer of 1914 Anatole, then aged twenty-five, was keeping company with Marie Graizon, an only daughter who would not be seventeen till the November. By November, Marie was pregnant and Anatole was at the front.

In village lore the exact dates have long been clouded in respectful reticence; the sequence of events is recited rhetorically, with much rolling of ‘r's' for the story has taken on a symbolic quality and represents all the personal tragedies of that time.

‘He came back from the war for just
three
days to marry her – then
three
days more when their son was born – and then that was that. Finished. Gone. Poor girl, she had no married life with him at all.'

In reality, events were a little less apocalyptic if just as bleak, for when Marie went into labour Anatole was already on leave, convalescing with a wounded arm. As the hours went by, he had to report back to barracks in Châteauroux before the child had appeared. It was the Chassignolles midwife who sent a message to him by means of the telephone in the Mairie, to tell him that he was the father of a son. He survived in the trenches for two years more before he was killed. His younger brother had already died there, a third was taken prisoner on the eastern front and returned after the war crippled and ‘half out of his mind'. But it is in the rest of young Madame Gonnin's story that the peculiar tragedy lies.

The child Aimé Gonnin was brought up by his mother in her parents' house and the hopes of all three were concentrated on him. From the village school he was sent to continue his education in La Châtre, then to study law in Limoges. He had his bicycle, his dog, his gun, his horse; later, when he was back in La Châtre articled to a local lawyer, he had his own car. He loved his mother and grandparents and was good at drawing. Photographs of him show a solid, short but rather handsome Berrichon with a cowlick of black hair and a noticeable resemblance to the writer Alain-Fournier. By 1939 he was all set to fulfil the family dream and became a successful member of the local bourgeoisie, the equivalent of a Pissavy-Yvernault. About the same time, the old farmhouse was abandoned for a new house the Graizons had built alongside, a home for gentlefolk with four or five well-lit rooms downstairs, each with a decoratively tiled or parquet floor. The aged Jean Beaumont (Apaire) had directed the setting of the roof timbers, and under that roof several good bedrooms with dormers had been planned: plenty of space for a new generation.

The bedrooms were never installed.

Aimé was one of the very few young men of Chassignolles – a handful compared with those of the previous war – not to return from the second one. Before the fall of France, he trod on a mine near the frontier with Belgium. That, once again, was that.

‘I remember her arriving at church for Mass the week after he'd been killed. She was like a spectre herself.' Madame Calvet, a generation younger.

Today, more than fifty years later, young Madame Gonnin is old Madame Caillaud,
la doyenne de la commune.
She is a survivor in every sense; in spite of her great age and her failing sight she is a neat, erect figure, dressed in sprigged navy with a small shawl of her own crochet work. Brisk, cheerful, firm in manner, devoted to her flowery garden and to current-affairs programmes on the radio, she lives alone with only a daily visit from the home-help who cooks her dinner – a well-built person on a motor bike described by Madame Caillaud, with a nice social nuance, as ‘my little help'. Yet the final, dominating role of her long and variegated life is that of an icon of suffering. She is a village memorial, just as much as the stone one near the church, to both wars together.

‘After the second war the Government offered me a decoration. They said it was because I had given both my loved ones to France. I refused it. I didn't give my own. They were taken from me.'

Long after her parents, too, were dead, she remarried. Monsieur Caillaud was a jolly widower and near-neighbour. ‘We were supping together most evenings anyway,' he told a male friend. ‘All I had to do was push the gate a little further open.'

Then, for about ten years, Marie had, according to her old friend Jeanne Pagnard, ‘a proper life':

‘They had a little car. Went on visits and trips. Meals out and so on. She was really happy.'

But then he died, as men do. Alone once again, Madame Caillaud lived on, guardian of the house that had been built to contain a future but which had become a museum of memories.

*   *   *

I visited her first on a still, golden afternoon in autumn, cycling past the football field – Stade Aimé Gonnin – that the family gave to the Commune. Leaves detached themselves silently from the horse and Spanish chestnuts one by one. She welcomed me graciously, offered Maxwell House coffee in miniature china vases, wondered energetically in passing if the coffee had been manufactured by that fat, drowned Englishman of whom she had just heard on the radio; wasn't he supposed to have embezzled…? But it was clear that her main purpose in inviting me was to show me over her shrine. As we moved through the rooms, the framed photos of her son at every stage and size – as a baby, receiving his first Communion, with friends in a hayfield, with others in a Limoges street, dressed for
la chasse,
at the wheel of his car – were like so many Stations of the Cross, each one requiring its own discourse. There too were his crayon drawings – beloved spaniel, beloved mother – and his qualifying certificate for his final law exams – ‘I received that weeks and weeks after he'd been killed …

‘We'd only just moved into the house. This was to have been his room.' A bedspread of heavy crocheted lace, Madame Caillaud's own work. Above the bed-head, a large wooden crucifix. She is said to be a devout believer ‘in spite of everything'; certainly, in younger days, the Pissavy-Yvernault granddaughter who occupied Mademoiselle Guyot's house, taught the catechism and burnt George Sand's letters, was an object of her particular affection. (‘Jeanne Pagnard has always had a fondness for Madame L, but her sister was
my
special friend.') But resigned acceptance of God's Will in the tradition of the dying Louis Yvernault does not seem to form part of Madame Caillaud's piety. I understood that day that this woman is a fighter by nature, not a forgiver.

Also on the walls, numerous tapestry pictures, that same ladylike
gros point
work that Célestine took to in middle life – ‘Yes, I did those too. I loved to embroider before my eyes went.' Flowers, a castle like Sarzay, a careful rendering of Millet's ‘The Gleaners'. This pretty, silent house is a museum to more than the dead of the wars.

Things are preserved inside Madame Caillaud's head, also, that have disappeared from the visible world. Given her great age, and the fact that she has always lived in a remote part of the Commune, for many years now she has paid only rare and fleeting visits to the centre of the village, and the Chassignolles that exists in her mind is still that of the 1940s and '50s, complete with shops, a barber's and a hairdresser's. She was surprised when I mentioned one day that I wished I could have seen the stone staircase on the outside of the Chaumette-Robin inn.