Cloudless May (27 page)

“Have you read Gamelin's order of the day?” Rienne asked gently.

Ollivier repeated it in a sing-song voice.
“Victory or death: it must be victory.
Ought I to tell my men to get their copybooks and write it out a hundred times? A military exercise, eh? Who does he think he's talking to, your Gamelin? Not to me.
It looks as though no one had any use for me and my tanks.”

“General Gamelin is going to be sacked. He has been sacked,” Rienne said softly. “Weygand will be in charge.”

After a moment Ollivier said, “Weygand is a tolerably good wine. But he's been in the cask rather long. That's my opinion. Tell me the truth, Bonamy. What are they thinking about—your old Piriac, your old Woerth, your charming old Ligny? Perhaps they've been forgotten. G.H.Q.—where is it, by the way?—may think as poorly of them as they do of my tanks.”

At last it's my turn to reassure you, Rienne thought. He gripped his friend by the shoulder and tried to shake him—he might as well have seized the trunk of a tree.

“This is the army of the Loire. It will strike when the time comes.”

“You think so?”

“I'm certain,” Rienne said calmly.

“You mean it will defend the Loire. But why not defend the Loire on the Somme? You don't defend the Loire on the Loire, you defend it precisely on the Marne or the Somme! Or, if it's too late for that, on the Seine. On the Loire you defend the Pyrénées. Or nothing at all.”

“Or France,” Rienne said.

Ollivier laughed. “You're always the same.”

“At my age even that's something,” Rienne said.

“At your age!” his friend cried. “You're forty-eight. I'm forty-seven and a half. We're colonels—it's not so bad. As for me”—he struck his forehead—“I shall die a colonel. Because of my tanks. After this war they'll retire me—'What a pity you took up tanks, old boy, you might have got on!' The idiots.” He laughed, in the best of humours now. “You, you'll get on. You'll die a general.”

“No,” Rienne said, smiling. “I'm stuck. They don't like me.”

“You mean Woerth doesn't,” Ollivier shouted. “He'll die.”

Rienne smiled. “I have the same chance.”

“War, lovely war,” Ollivier cried joyously. “It includes all the chances. To be promoted, to be killed, to live to be old. And we owe it to having to fight the Boche every twenty years! Poor sinners of Boches. What's wrong with them? They have excellent wine, their wives have children, they have mountains,
not such bad ones, and they have the sun, not like poor devils of countries where all they have is whisky and fog. In fact they have nearly all we have—apart from their ugly mugs. Why aren't they content?”

“You've forgotten—we weren't always so content.”

But Ollivier was inexorable this morning for the Boches. “They've had as much chance as we have to learn better. I have my ideas. The fact is they behave in this way because they don't exist. There are no Germans, there is no Germany; there are Rhinelanders, Württembergers, Bavarians, Saxons—my God, what half-witted scoundrels!—the Prussians—what brutes!—but no Germans. Some idiot—my God, wasn't it Bismarck?—put it into their heads to be Germans. And it hasn't come off! You can't beget a child or make a family by marching, waving flags, and quarrelling with the neighbours. I'll tell you how to make a family. You must stay quietly in the same place for a hundred years—at least a hundred; you must polish carefully a revolting old chair because it belonged to a great-grandfather who was a hero, though you don't know exactly what it was he did—or you know very well and it's better not to say too much about it; you must keep hanging up a mirror you can't look into, it's gone perfectly black; you must be conceived, conceive, and die in the same bed, always the same bed, so much the worse for your heir—naturally the mattress is remade now and then—what was I saying? Yes, yes, that's a family. There was a Rhenish family, a Bavarian family—and all the others. There is no German family. So every twenty years they have to yell, 'Germans, we are Germans,' and rush murderously at us poor peasants, us poor French—who know perfectly well what a family is. We shall never have peace until the very name of German and Germany is forgotten, and there are only good Rhinelanders and the rest. I insist on Rhinelanders. They have very good wine, and like me they talk nonsense. . . .”

“We French,” Rienne said, “are two families. Not one. Two. And we quarrel.”

“You are right,” Ollivier shouted. “You are always right. I won't listen to you.”

Rienne frowned as though he were smiling. “Very well. I'll only say this—one of our two families is France, the others are
at any rate Frenchmen. So—whatever happens in this war—France will go on.”

Ollivier was silent, by the same instinct that would keep him lying still if he were wounded.

“So you are not sure,” he said at last.

“I am sure,” Rienne said.

Ollivier looked at him with the young man's candour he kept in reserve, and said softly,

“I am sure of myself, I'm not a coward. I am sure of you. Of my men. Of most of them. Of them all. I'm not sure of anything else.”

“You're not asked,” Rienne said lovingly, “to be sure of anything else.”

He delivered his message from the general, and left. As he recrossed the Loire he heard a faint vibrant noise a long way off—artillery practice, no doubt. Or it was the great bow of the Loire itself, drawn taut against the barbarian invasion. Half-closing his eyes, he saw it stretched in front of the vulnerable heart of France, springing upwards from the sea as high as
Orléans—Orleans, qui
ê
tes au pays de Loire
—and wound tightly round volcanic mountains in the south-east. Such a bow is not slackened without treachery.

Taking one way to the barracks he passed the small twelfth-century church of St. Nicholas. He had time, and went in. He made his prayer not for any person or for forgiveness, but for the one word that was as new as this church. The word Ur, the word Mycenae, had fallen into silence, without the world being any the worse for it. But the word France must go on, since the whole world had been waiting for it, for this frail new point piercing a young branch, smelling of the leaf, of autumn, promising Chartres and Tours, and foreknowing or remembering Ronsard, Hugo, Péguy, the battle of the Marne, Verdun. All this, which was still hidden in the future, still wrapped in the fresh bud, must not be lost. Nor must a word be lost that hid in itself the poorest village—with its single dusty square, its single café, its poor and tremendous church, seeming so much too large for such a small village, and in fact scarcely large enough to accommodate so many dead. The word for Thouédun, for instance.

That evening Rienne tricked Mathieu into coming out with him to Thouédun. He pretended only to have time to talk to him there. The truth was he wanted to force Mathieu to idle. And the evening—balancing the morning—was perfect, a coolness imitating the coolness of early morning, a barely credible blue of the evening sky answering the improbable blue of noon. During these weeks, so unlucky for France, you could believe that nature, whom the French have obeyed more loyally than any other people—letting her rage in their habits like a green sap, leaving their lawns untrimmed, devoting the lives of ten or twenty generations to improve a vine—nature was trying to compensate them for what was coming. Like a mother promising everything to her dying son.

But, of all that generosity of flower and light, Mathieu noticed nothing, nothing at all. His passion for France was a passion for an idea. If you reminded him that the Idea had clothed itself in the wheat of the Beauce, in certain delicious rivers, in vines, in the warmth and lime trees of the Dordogne, he would have agreed as one agrees with a child that the sand running through his fingers is gold. He was born, had lived all his life, and was determined to die among the wide clear valleys of Loire, Cher, Indre, Vienne, springing with trees and superb buildings, yet nowhere terrible or grandiose; he was living in that part of France where the ideal of the just measure is perfectly realised, between the young Indre, the young Loir, and the adult Loire; cradled by Indre and Loir, blessed by Loire; in a light at once calm and joyous, able to drink at their sharp point of savour and delicacy the wines of Touraine and Anjou—and he was indifferent to all of it. What he never forgot was that he had been born in a part of France where more harvests have been ruined by war than in any other, at crossroads the Romans themselves had found to be important, and on the seam, the strong seam, joining the north and south of France. He was not indifferent to the scent of history. He could recite the names of older children of this courageous and always polite region: Gregory and Alcuin of Tours, Charles of Orléans, Rabelais, Joachim du Bellay, Ronsard, Descartes, Alfred de
Vigny, but his ears were deaf to their words. He had not even noticed yet that the donjons of the castles, like the feudal walls themselves, had flowered airily with windows and sculptures and adorned themselves with lawns reflected in the clear moats.

They were at Rienne's house in time for supper. Mlle Agathe looked at Mathieu with pity. She could not detect on him any marks made by a woman, not even a mother. This decided her to sit down with them to the meal. Never would she bring herself to sit at table with Bonamy's other friends, but it was obvious with this one that he would notice her less than a chair. She listened.

Mathieu was complaining that he had been restricted to a single sheet for the
Journal,
although Derval, “that salacious little nincompoop,” still had four pages for his
New Order.
Sometimes, for good measure, six.

Rienne smiled. “He speaks for at least four interests—the Mayor, our respected deputy, Monsieur Huet, Monsieur de Thiviers, and himself. The two extra are for Mussolini. You, my poor Louis, only speak for the truth.”

“I speak for common Frenchmen,” Mathieu said harshly. Agathe could not help smiling, she who had been a peasant, at this boast. “But I lie to them. That is, I don't tell them the truth. I'm forbidden. Why? Why am I forbidden to tell them how near they are to being a battlefield? When they see it for themselves they'll bolt. Is that what someone—
that
for the names!—wants?”

“But we're not going to be defeated,” Rienne said placidly.

Agathe watched the words form themselves slowly on Mathieu's tongue, against the pull of his heart. He said reluctantly,

“The German nation is a powerful machine.”

“Then,” her brother retorted, “it can't grow. It has neither roots nor sap.”

Agathe used up all her courage to speak.

“It says,
There is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth; yet through the scent of water it will bud.”

“I was wrong to speak of Germany as a machine,” Mathieu said, ignoring her. “There is a living Germany—which is nothing like us. It's truly a different species. In our air a
mediaeval building grows shabby, like an old woman, but it tries to understand what's going on among the young people. Over there, it remains the age it was born, and the air round it is the air of the Middle Ages. Here there are no mysteries, except human mysteries of jealousy, hatred, love. In Germany a single tree isolated in the middle of a plain, a single stork flying above a house, is charged with magic. And how their old houses shine with newness, like their children with washing. And their rivers are colder than ours and their forests darker. On a blazing day in Munich I found a dozen places, gardens and cafés, where I needed my coat.”

“You like Germany,” Rienne said.

“The Germany I hate is murdering the Germany I loved,” Mathieu said roughly.

“I have never felt the least wish to leave France,” Rienne said, smiling. “The people everywhere else are really barbarians, aren't they? At best strangers. Of no importance unless they invade us. Be honest, Louis. There's no painting, architecture, or books worth bothering about in these countries? For a Frenchman?”

“The English know how to write,” Mathieu said drily.

“But we have Montaigne and Hugo and Vigny,” Rienne said. “What else can you possibly need?”

“There are a few good buildings in Germany and Italy.”

“We have Chartres,” Rienne said simply.

Mathieu looked at him with what on another face, more legible, would have meant affection. “How French you are!”

This was more than Agathe could bear. “Of course he is!” she cried. “Why not?”

Mathieu looked at her with respect. For the first time he noticed her angular body, as strong and stiff as an axe-handle, and worn to the hand of a good workman. She had been well used, or she had used herself. When she died she would lie as straight in the ground as a worn-out tool. God, if He concerns Himself with these things, would be able to say of her, “That must be one of my peasants from Anjou, they all have big straight bones.” He asked her permission to talk about a delicate subject, one on which her advice would be useful. Agathe trembled with pride and shame.

“Of course,” she murmured. “But I know nothing.”

He looked directly at her brother. “You have some influence with Émile.” He paused, and said, “With Bergeot”—as though he needed the support of the surname. “Is it stronger than Madame de Freppel's?”

Agathe felt this blow at her brother's happiness. She took back at once all the support she had momently given Mathieu.

“What do you mean?” Rienne said.

“I have proofs,” Mathieu said slowly, “I have been given proofs, that she is too friendly with people who—whatever their profession—seem to have taken on a second, that of stopping the war.”

“Is that a bad thing?” Agathe stammered.