Cloudless May (26 page)

“Certainly not. I dislike having a new man to wait on me.”

The noise of a wall collapsing was so clear in Rienne's head that he glanced at the window, expecting that the barracks had gone. But it was only the superb legend, built up during more than forty years, of Piriac's kindness to his men. This tremendous edifice rested on half a dozen phrases, on the memory he used to have for a face. It could be destroyed in a minute, and so far as Rienne was concerned, now had been. He looked at the commander-in-chief's heavy square body propped between his chair and the table, and saw it as a monument, made of callousness and stupidity, to the dead legend. Glancing at Ligny, he saw that he was meditating some not so innocent mischief.

Ligny spoke in a mild voice.

“You've read this morning's despatch, sir?”

Piriac said, “Yes,” heavily, a paw crushing its victim.

“We can talk about that later,” Woerth said coldly.

“I should like to hear Colonel Rienne's opinion,” Ligny said, smiling. “Out of the mouths of babes . . . Rienne, my boy, what's your idea of the tactics to be used now?”

Rienne was well used to being the victim of Ligny's pleasure in annoying Woerth. “Surely, sir, the troops in Belgium ought to be retired at top speed to the Somme, and every tank in the country thrown into the German salient?”

Ignoring Rienne, Woerth said,

“My dear Ligny, when war is made according to the fancies of your subordinates, you will no doubt be put in charge.”

Ligny, as absorbed as a child in his game, hid his smiles.

“What's your theory of modern war?”

“There is no such thing as modern war. There is war,” Woerth said, frowning. “Which is a pure question of mathematics. A certain proportion of men and territory lost equals defeat. The proportion varies according to the value. given to the terms of the equation. Everything else is metaphors for the use of children—who are amused by counting apples instead of decimals. That's all.”

“Ah,” Ligny said, smiling openly, “that's what you were taught on papa Gigi's staff. Do you know what I think? It's Calvinism—and you a good son of the Church! It's the purest determinism, without a rag of faith. And counting men and kilometres—you might be behind the counter of a shop! Tradesmen!”

At this moment an officer came in with the mail for Woerth. Before Woerth could dismiss him, Ligny had asked him innocently how far the Germans had advanced in the last twenty-four hours.

“Thirty-two kilometres, four hundred and seventy metres.”

“You were on General Giginac's staff, weren't you?” Ligny smiled.

“Yes, sir.”

“I thought so. He made a great point of arithmetic.”

With a cold fury, Woerth sent away the officer. He looked sourly at Ligny.

“No doubt you were taught some esoteric theory of war. According to you, it's chance, or aeroplanes—or astrology.”

“Not at all,” Ligny said pleasantly. “War is art. Perhaps religious art. The Pope, at the head of a General Staff of cardinals with red hats, sends out his Bulls, the humble obey. There are also the few saints, with their genius for improvising a victory—naturally they are dismissed or degraded, and afterwards canonised. Properly looked at, it's fascinating.”

During the last two or three minutes Rienne had been watching General Piriac. Barely perceptible movements of his face betrayed that somewhere behind the outwork of bone and heavy
flesh a thought had begun to move. It moved from handhold to handhold, like a child learning to walk. He now uttered one word.

“Verdun.”

It meant, as Rienne knew, that in its sedulous journey upward, his mind had reached the months during the last war when he was on Pétain's staff at Verdun. He had had a terrifying vision of defeat there. He had never been able to understand why Verdun did not equal defeat.

Without moving his head—he moved as little as possible—he looked at his chief of staff. “What did you say?”

Bewildered, Woerth said, “What do you mean, sir?”

“The Seine will be defended,” Piriac muttered.

Woerth spoke gently. “What—for twenty years—has been our nightmare? Invasion. Always invasion. Against it we built the Maginot. There is no Maginot. It has been breached. A torrent of machines is rushing across our fields and villages. We cannot reach the Seine in time to stop it. Where can we stop it? Where do we draw the line below which anything we write stands for defeat?”

Ligny had been sand-bagging the edge of his plate with fragments of bread. He swept them away now and turned on Woerth a look of pretended awe.

“How simple you make it all! Tell me—did you see yesterday's
Journal?
The editor has yet another theory of war, the—what shall I call it?—the natural-historical theory . . . he demands that all the towns and villages in the bed of the torrent shall roll up into hedgehogs of guns, sacrificing themselves to delay the Germans until our armies of the Loire and the Midi can be brought up. Interesting, what?”

Ligny knew that Woerth looked on Jews and the foreigners in France as a patch of leprosy, a gangrened wound. To round off his joke he turned to Rienne and asked what he thought of Mathieu, who had written the article.

Rienne said, “He is a good Frenchman.” He reflected that if Woerth had been asked to collaborate with God in making a Frenchman he would have left out every taint of enthusiasm, prophecy, scepticism, as well as all the natural appetites which make a Frenchman the soundest as well as the least tractable of human beings. What would be left? A country in which a
soldier who is a good Catholic, with simple tastes, and a belief in chastity and obedience, feels at home. Rienne himself would be at home in any age of simple honourable faith, but—what a drawback!—he was not prepared to massacre his fellows to create an illusion of one. He had the modesty, as well as its pride, of his race. Of his French race.

Woerth spoke coldly to him. “I believe you're also a friend of Monsieur Bergeot. Of the Prefect. You could usefully tell him that he is playing with revolution. How does he know that all these factory hands he wants to excite about the war won't turn against the State? If we fight a long war, they will. Defeat in the next week or two equals a compromise with Hitler. An endless exhausting war equals Stalin. Between these two, any sane man knows what to think.”

“Why not think simply of France?” Ligny said soberly.

“I am thinking of France.”

And if he collaborates on a new France, thought Rienne, he will leave out the half-dozen young men and women dancing, to an accordion and a fiddle hidden behind a rood-screen of branches, in the shabby squares of villages on the evening of July 14; and the patient wolfish men arguing over a glass of wine at the wooden table outside cafés; and the tongues clacking at every corner; and the poachers lying out between stream and forest; and the millions of dead entrenched along the Marne, along the Somme, along the Vosges, across every route habitually used by the invaders of France; not to speak of the poets, and the young men who preferred strolling to marching. It will be a France where no one will dare to invent anything. What a bore!

Piriac's mind had passed another stage of its blind journey. “My people here,” he said slowly, “are good people. They are good children. They are not like the politicians, corrupt. If one of them is disobedient he can be chastised.” He looked at Woerth as though he were repeating a lesson. “We have the power.”

Woerth made a show of asking Ligny's permission to employ his A.D.C., his own being on leave.

“My dear fellow, you do as you like,” Ligny said ironically.

“I'm obliged to you,” Woerth said in a dry voice. He turned to Rienne. “Go across the bridge and inform Colonel Ollivier
that I shall inspect the defences on Sunday. On Sunday. You understand?”

Rienne withdrew. As he shut the door he felt that they were all, even Ligny, glad to get rid of him. He embarrassed them. When he was in the room with them they suppressed the subaltern, living in each of them, and the middle-aged officer whose life had been blamelessly spartan, simple, upright. They were forced to live at least in the last war. The moment he went they could slip back yet another fifteen years. Piriac another twenty-five. They have still, he thought, their youth. Then what is it they lack? Simply the future—in which none of them, not even my dear Ligny, believes.

He was glad of the chance to see Colonel Ollivier. Ollivier was his other close friend, his friend by choice—chosen for him by himself—as Émile Bergeot was his friend by birth. Michel Ollivier was the first person who spoke to him at the Poly-technique. When Rienne thought of him he could only evoke the young man of that first morning, with his air of innocence, of knowing nothing of the world. How unlike Émile's practised assurance! Yet Michel had his own confidence. He was countrified, he never lost the look of being more used to a harrow than a sword, but when he came in it was with an air of being welcome: he looked straight at your face, with candour—and it was pleasant to look back at him, at that confident forehead, as smooth as a girl's, broad, rounded outwards like a young child's. He was short and carried his head high. He had a quiet voice. All of him, his glance, his forehead, all his person, had this air of youth and a strict secret assurance.

Six months younger than the young Rienne, equally poor, equally without useful relations—his father was a farmer of the Beauce—he took Rienne under his protection, under the protection of his invincible innocence. He had the assurance of the child who laughs when he asks for something, certain that no one can refuse him anything he wants.

Since that time, he had grown hard and tough, like his ancestors about whom their neighbours said, “Those Olliviers would never die, if death didn't surprise them when they're not looking.” So far Michel had kept his eyes open—in the last war his men joked, “He can see the bullets.” But he had suffered—there are sorrows it is not so easy to dodge as death. He was known for his mulishness, his intractable intellect. Yet, in the first instant of seeing him, what you saw was still the young man's air of assurance, childlike, secret, the candour, the rounded forehead, the head lifted without conceit to look up.

In 1917 Rienne was severely wounded on the Chemin des Dames, and he took with him into his drugged half-death the frightful humiliation of seeing his company fall back broken. He opened his eyes on Ollivier's look of loving assurance. “It's you,” Rienne said. “But of course it's me. . . .” Rienne fell asleep. It was only weeks later, when he returned to his battalion, he learned that Ollivier at the time was being rushed to the base hospital for an operation, and by sheer force of spirit had made them take him to Rienne's bed. . . . “I don't know why, but it was impossible to refuse him. . . .”

What other men could not refuse him, life did easily. He had married in his village: his son was born in December 1915, and when the letter from his father-in-law came he hurried to Rienne with the news. “And think, Bonamy—if I'm killed there'll be someone to shout back when a boy yells ‘Hi, Ollivier' in the street in the evening.” But his son, when the letter reached him—letters in war-time never bring news, only anecdotes of the past—had been dead for five days and his wife for three. . . . He did well in the war; and he was refused his promotions after he became colonel because of his obstinacy in sticking to tanks. The more his tanks were despised, the more he clung to them. . . . He was now forty-seven, thick-set, a little slower—his family had rheumatism from force of habit—but his friend could still surprise in him the child delighted to hope, the young man full of candour and assurance. Just as, when he remembered him, it was the young man who came—and would always come—even when they were both retired colonels, old men smiled at behind their backs for their fads.

By now there was a veil of heat over the distance, over the blue sky. It muted sounds, too. The noise of the traffic, of a
motor horn, voices, were all muffled by a fine wadding of heat. Rienne walked along the Quai d'Angers in a silence through which he could hear only country sounds—the bees under an acacia, a cock crowing, two doves answering each other behind a wall. He had never felt happier. He moved through this life within a life with as easy a lightness as he would feel on the last day of the war. An expectancy as sharp—It's finished. Now to begin.

On this, the south side of the Loire, everything was calm, civilised, nothing jarred, the scent of the acacias was just noticeable; everything was in proportion: of the shabby houses along the embankment none was too tall for its neighbours, none pushed itself forward; although it was close on noon the light falling from the sky was matched deliciously by the cooler light rising from the river; everything spoke the language of Anjou, of France. A gun on this side of the river pointed north, towards barbarism. A soldier on duty had a look of Lucien Sugny, the same large peasant hands, the same blue eyes, fixed and stubborn.

Rienne crossed the bridges. He walked the five hundred-odd yards, passing the ends of five or six narrow side streets, to the house—almost the last house on this side of Seuilly, the side facing the enemy—where Colonel Ollivier had his headquarters. The first thing Ollivier said to him had to do with the enemy. He said it as he came out of the room at the back—it was dark in these rooms with one window, high in the wall, so that the light fell first on his forehead, bulging above his thick body: he held himself straight, without stiffness.

“It's you. Where are the Boches?”

“They will be held on the Somme,” Rienne said.

Ollivier came close to him and shouted. He was angry. “Why don't they send for us? Why am I being kept down here? Seuilly is stuffed to the house-tops with troops, tanks, munitions. Are we waiting until the Boches reach us? What's up?”