Planus (20 page)

'Here is the young man. Shall I put him at your table, then?' asked Renee, the prettiest waitress in Aix, a jolly, hard-working, tireless girl from Saint-Martin-de-Crau, who was devoted to her work and busy earning herself a dowry.

'Yes, that's right. Bring him here,' I said to Renee and, to the
patron
: 'See if you can get us a steak. Can't you manage somehow?'

'No, not today. But I can give you a pork chop, will that do?'

'With gherkins?'

'No gherkins.'

'Mustard?'

'No mustard.'

'Oh, damn! Chips?'

'If you like.'

'Perfect. And some decent wine, a
pelure d'oignon.
That'll make One more bottle the Jerries won't get their hands on!'

\ . . I am a railway mechanic. I belong to the depot at Aries. I went to Germany as a volunteer, I wanted to see the country.

Besides, everyone said we'd be conscripted and I believed it. My name is Albarelle, Louis Albarelle, registered number 212/731. I come from the Cevennes, from Fonterault. My father is still the village constable there. It's near Saint-Germain-de-Calberte. Everyone in the district knows us,' said the young man, when Felicien's wife had slyly served us a
pate de campagne,
hidden under a napkin, and some gherkins (the knowing witch!) and had uncorked a bottle of wine — not
pelure d'oignon,
for there was none left, but a lively little wine from Rousillon, which was very palatable.

'Don't rush your fences, young 'un. Where have you come from?'

'Hamburg.'

'When did you leave?'

'Five days ago.5

*You didn't come on foot?'

'No, by train.'

'Left or right bank of the Rhine?'

'Left bank.'

'Did you have a ticket?'

'They weren't even bothering to issue tickets, things were so chaotic everywhere!'

'Did you have a pass or some sort of papers? Weren't they checking along the way?'

'I tore up my papers, but there were no check-ups on the route, things were totally disorganized. You can't imagine what it's like. Germany is destroyed, whole towns wiped out.'

'Do you speak German?' 'No.'

'So how did you manage?'

'God knows. Nobody took any notice of me. It was every man for himself. I got through somehow. I haven't eaten for three days.'

'Have you got any money?'

'A few marks.'

'And where did you enter France?'

'At Strasbourg. Then I went on to Lyon and changed trains for Grenoble, Veynes, and that's how I got to Aix. I thought it was better to take the train over the Alps, so as to avoid my pals at Aries, like I told you. I was afraid I'd be recognized. I'm known ill along that line.'

'Are you ashamed, or have you just got cold feet?'

'Neither. If you like, I'm ready to go and give myself up at Aries, Mid so much the worse for me if my mates don't understand that Anybody can make a mistake! I've thought it over. I'm ready. But I'd rather make myself useful first. The maquis ...'

Tell me, can they get information about you from Aries?'

'I'm a member of the Trade Union. They've got my records. You can check up.'

'Don't worry, they won't fail to do so! Do you have friends in Strasbourg? Who gave you that civvy suit?'

<' 'No, I don't know anyone there. I went to a priest and he gave DM these old clothes, but he didn't have any shoes. I had heard that the priests in Alsace were helping people escape.'

'And how did you cross the frontier?' 'I don't know. No one got out of the train when it stopped at Strasbourg and no one came aboard to check passports. Nobody noticed me, so I got through all right. Then I changed trains at Lyon.'

'You were in luck! But I think you're telling the truth. The Boche is getting careless. A sign of the times, there must be a change in the wind. I don't trust them, it won't be long now before they get really vicious. I know them. Tell me, why didn't you go straight home to your father?'

'Because of what people would say. They must know I volunteered to work in Germany.'

'So you're afraid?'

'No, I've already told you I'm not. But I feel badly for the old man's sake. I'd rather go and fight.'

'It's not always so easy.'

'Why not?'

'Because.'

'You mean. . . ?'

'Yes,' I said to him, 'there are traitors.'

I could see that he was cut to the quick.

Felicien was shaking his frying-pan over the fire and pretending to be deaf, but his ears were flapping and he winked at me.

'Don't be too hard on him, Monsieur Cendrars,' he whispered as he leaned over me to serve the sizzling-hot chips and cut up the chop on my plate with his large kitchen-knife, as he always did. 'Remember, the poor lad's at the end of his tether. He's an honest little workman, I know the type! He admits he's done wrong. We must help him put it right. Don't forget we, too, did some damn- fool things at his age. Life isn't always a joke....'

I was perfectly well aware of the invidious situation in which the poor fellow found himself, and I understood the terrors he must have gone through before deciding to return to France. But, by coming back here, he had stuck his head into a hornets' nest. It was all very well his wanting to join the maquis, but perhaps the maquis would not want him. Quite a problem. And certainly it was no joke....

I filled the glasses.

'What year were you called up?' I asked the fellow.

'Nineteen-forty,' he said, 'I was mobilized at work, on the railway. I was a stoker.'

'And the Jerries took you on as an engine-driver, eh? It was a promotion for you. Their engines are splendid, aren't they?'

'Much better than the French ones, and much more solidly built. But what really bowled me over was the maintenance system. The moment you draw into the station, the crew comes aboard. You don't have to worry about another thing, you can go and sleep, stretch out for a kip in the canteen, and when you go back on duty the engine is ready, everything's polished and in perfect working order. And it's the women who do that job! It's amazing. At Aries...'

'I know,' I said. 'Our engines are filthy, and nowadays they're falling to bits. How long did you stay in Germany?'

'Not quite a year. I left in September. The 21st . . .'

mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>   'And where did you work in Hamburg? At the Altona station?'

'You know it, then?'

And the fellow smiled for the first time since I had begun interrogating him, and breathed more freely.

'Do I know Hamburg! I've been there twenty times or more! So has the
patron.
It's a fine city, isn't it, Felicien? Gay, lively, clean, it's the only city in Germany where you don't die of boredom, because of the port. Ah, the port! And the Hagenbeck Zoo, and the people. The Hamburgers aren't Prussians, they're proud, independent people. It used to be a free city and the naval shipwrights, who are all communists, revolted in 1918-19, in 1921 and again in 1923, an,d they were the only men in the whole of Germany to stand out against the Nazis, resisting them until the last possible moment. Do you still see these comrades in the streets, with their bell-bottoms, their velvet hats and knotted canes? They're a jolly bunch!'

'I never met any.'

'And do you know the seamen's cemetery?'

'I never heard of it.'

'It's the old cemetery surrounding the church in Stefani, where the shipbuilders live. It's not like other graveyards. There's a special enclosure set aside for those drowned at sea, and it's full of rusty and rotting anchors, chains, oars nailed together in the form of a cross, painted sternposts, monuments improvised out of pieces of wreckage encrusted with barnacles and set up by sailors to commemorate some shipwreck, and the ground is strewn with bottles containing models of ships lost at sea and the names of the entire crew, from the ship's boy to the captain, written on parchment! It's a very moving sight, and I never failed to visit the sailors' cemetery in Hamburg. When I wasn't there, I'd be in front of the cages at the Hagenbeck. On one occasion I came across a ship's boy stretched out on the sand, crying his eyes out. I thought he was weeping for a relative or a lost friend, but when I questioned him he told me he had just signed on for the first time, he was about to embark on a four-master, the schooner
Markus,
which was going to

Chile to pick up nitrate; he'd never been to sea in his life and the poor kid was crying from sheer terror!

You say there's nothing left of Hamburg? So when did this happen? Tell me all about it I hear everything's reduced to ashes, but the papers haven't said a word about it yet, nor has the radio from London. And you say there must be two hundred thousand dead? Well, we'll soon find out!'

'The Germans are hushing it all up, but it's the same thing all over Germany. It's a disaster. All the towns are getting it, one after the other. It's the end, everybody's convinced of it,' said the young man, 'the British planes come over every night.' 1

'Perhaps the BBC is waiting for details before making an announcement,' said Felicien, excited and overjoyed.

'Reducing a port like Hamburg to the state Coventry is in is hardly a detail, Felicien! But it's the most impressive news since the Battle of Stalingrad was won, at Christmas. That was the Russian Verdun. This is the turning-point of the war. If it's true, the Boche is really buggered. And if it were true, the English wouldn't have been able to keep their mouths shut any more than the Fritzes did in September 1940, when they announced the Blitz and the destruction of the London docks. Don't you remember how jubilant they were on the radio? Damn that lousy radio, we sit with our ears glued to it and they can tell us anything they like, anywhere in the world. I listen to them all, but I don't believe any of them
any
more. I listen all night long. But it's too frustrating, I'm sick of it. . .'

'It was last Friday,' said the engine-driver, leaning forward with his elbows on the table and lowering his voice as if he were still in Jerryland and enemy ears could hear him recounting his sensational news.

It was nearly the end of the lunch-hour. In the main part of the restaurant the regular customers were leaving or had already left. Renee stacked the dishes in a bowl of hot water and busied herself with her work, not giving a hoot for our 'round table' discussion, thinking only of her fiance, the violinist. Felicien came and sat with us, precariously balanced astride a chair; he wiped his hands on his apron, rolled and lit a cigarette. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up and his tall chef's hat, floating on his head like an emanation, stuck to his forehead in the stifling heat of the narrow kitchen. Struggling flies stuck to the wretched fly-papers dangling from the ceiling. From the Mule Noire, the hotel across the street where the Jerries had installed some kind of commissariat, we could hear voices and coarse laughter, the clumping of boots, the clatter of crockery, benches scraping along the floor and a general hubbub. They too had finished lunch and from time to time a big, pot-bellied man passed in front of the open window, it was always the same man, an officer who was buttoning or unbuttoning his uniform, on his way to Or coming from the bog, with a cigar in his mouth; the others, mostly older men, many of them working on the railway, were already lined up in the street, answering the arrogant roll-call of a
Feldwebel
or NCO. When they had received their orders, or a travel warrant, they went off in twos and threes towards the station, their heads poking forward as if their porcelain pipes weighed them down, each with a black basket or a saddle-bag hanging on his arm, going to do the night shift, taciturn, worn out before they started, and far from easy in their minds, for they were beginning to blow up the trains in France.

It was in the spring of 1942 that the Allied Nations began the aerial attack. From then on, this offensive was pursued unremittingly. In a series of ferocious raids, Lubeck, Rostock, Kiel and Trondheim were bombarded one by one. On 30th May, one thousand British aeroplanes, that is to say many more than the Germans had ever sent on a single raid over Great Britain, bombed Cologne.

The British bombers, flying by night and at low altitudes, delivered devastating blows at many carefully chosen industrial targets. The Germans, who had always counted on a swift victory and had believed their country invulnerable to raids, had neglected their anti-aircraft defences. They made hasty efforts to correct this omission. . ..

Town after town in the industrial region of the Ruhr was set ablaze by incendiary bombs and reduced to rubble by the use of weapons of hitherto unheard-of explosive power....

During the course of daring raids carried out on 17th May, 1943, the RAF destroyed two large German dams, that of the Eder, near Hamfurth, and that of the Moehne, near Soest. Tons of water invaded the Ruhr valley, flooding factories, stopping generators and paralyzing transport. Next, the submarine bases were systematically bombed. Then it was the turn of the great industrial cities: Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen, Dusseldorf, Hanover and Mannheim. In July 1943 ten raids, three of them exceptionally heavy, destroyed Hamburg, Germany's greatest port. ...

'I haven't been able to close my eyes since,' he said, CI haven't slept for a week. It was like a carnival and, in the early hours, millions of silver leaves were strewn all over the ruins, fluttering among the dead bodies, streaming from the rubble of buildings, or flying up to the sky wafted by the smoke of fires and, in spite of the tragedy, you might have thought it was the morning after a carnival, the ravaged zone was so littered with confetti and silver streamers.'

'A funny sort of carnival!' I said.

'But what were these silver streamers?' asked Felicien.

'I don't know,' replied the dazed survivor, 'they were strips of silver paper, large and small, some were wound up and unrolled in the wind just like streamers. I can't imagine what use they are. People said the English planes had dropped them. There was nothing written on them. Perhaps it's a disinfectant against epidemics, for there are thousands, hundreds of thousands of dead, the bodies look as if they've been washed up in heaps by a tidal wave. Or it might be a poison. It looks like chocolate paper. In any case, nobody touches it.'