Cloudless May (51 page)

Letourneau did not answer. Stretched out uncomfortably in his chair, his arms hanging, he stared at nothing. Rienne knew this look of absence; it meant that he was holding his tongue because it is no use answering fools.

“You think we're doing badly,” he said, vexed.

“All I think,” Letourneau said mildly, “is that a unique culture, the richest in the world, the most nearly perfect, the most sensible, the supplest, the most joyous, has been allowed to starve. For the sake of economy. We have economised ourselves to death.”

“Robbing future generations of this house to add a few thousand francs to Monsieur Labenne's income,” Mourey said.

“If all they have lost is your house——” Letourneau said.

“You're angry, both of you, because you're not fighting,” Rienne said. “I feel that myself,” he added softly.

“I can't promise, if things get worse, not to fight,” the priest said. “I have a bad temper.”

“My God,” Mourey said, “I'd burn this house myself rather than hand it over to the Germans. And Paris and Chartres with it.”

“That may happen,” Rienne said. “Another of our national vices—you can credit it against our thrift or avarice—is freedom.”

“Ah,” Letourneau said, “when we have lost it we shall find another name for it. Perhaps simpler. Look, I shall say, there's a magpie. And you'll hear, Look, there's our freedom. And our dead friends. And our immortality.”

Mourey had kept out his best wine—there were two bottles of it—an admirable Vouvray. Nothing insistent in it: it was both delicate and robust, moderately smooth, moderately lively. It had even a slight sharpness, a trace of the sea air which had penetrated this far up the Loire before the tang of seaweed was overborne by the scent of the vines themselves.

“To tomorrow,” he said, lifting his glass.

“A very good little wine,” Letourneau said, smiling.

“You say that we French adore freedom,” Mourey said. “We adore it in ourselves, not in each other. A few of us—Montaigne—understand it better than any people in the world: all the rest feel about it like Napoleon—something to use, and
deny to the others. The paradox of France. Freedom, now, here, is freedom to abuse, to deny, to suppress. You'll see—our Thiviers will betray France rather than risk their beloved liberty. For which,” he said, looking at Letourneau, “they have found another name already. Their security, they call it. Or their prudence.”

“I don't believe it,” Rienne said. “For one Thiviers there are a thousand, a million of us.”

Mourey stroked the wall behind his chair. “How large ought a cancer to be before you'll allow that it's dangerous?”

Rienne scarcely heard him. His sense of well-being—in a room which tomorrow would be empty and handed over to the house-breakers—was too firm. Without knowing, he had tuned his ears to pick up only reassuring sounds, the noise of an aeroplane in the distance, the tap-tap of Mourey's fingers on the side of his chair, as he used to hear it when Mourey, off duty, was reading in the cellar they shared in front of Morlancourt. How easy after twenty years to slip back into the old habits. Even if habit was a sort of death, as Péguy said, it was at least a friendly sort in a world which has too sharp an acquaintance with brutal uncontrolled unfriendly dying. He stood up, reluctantly, to go back to the barracks. It is much easier to live in the last war than to accustom yourself to this.

His two friends came with him as far as the Quai d'Angers. It was as dark as it would be this June night, with a cindery pallor in the sky like a dying fire. Later, half a moon would rise high enough to drown the few darker shadows.

The smell of burning trees was very distinct. It came into Seuilly from the direction of Chartres, crossing the plain of the Beauce and the Pleiades of valleys, woods, patchwork of grain and clover, webs of roads, tougher network of paths, the banks of rivers, hectares of vines, to reach at last the vines and sandbanks of the Loire. The Loire—so placed that it could carry sounds from every part of France, parish bells, footsteps in houses, in village streets, in old gardens. No sound was too delicate or too powerful to be picked up by its fingers, by Cher, Indre, Vienne, Loir, and transferred to the warm hollow of its hand.

“Now do you smell the trees?” Letourneau said.

“Yes.”

“It's the first time in Seuilly,” the priest murmured. “I don't like it.”

“It smells of autumn,” Mourey said.

Rienne left them disputing how near was the fire. Could it be as far as the Seine? . . . As soon as he reached the barracks he got Ligny to send him to General Woerth. He talked about Derval. Woerth listened with a bored air for a minute, then yawned and said coldly,

“I see no point in interfering. If the civilian authorities have released him, they must have sound reasons. I'm not interested.”

Days of bright sun and terrible heat. As hour by hour the war became clearer—all the despair, the anger, the bitterness, the strategic withdrawals, the terror, on one side, all the triumphs on the other—Bergeot recovered his confidence. The Germans had crossed the Aisne, they reached Rouen, all the English had gone home and their aeroplanes had returned cruelly to bomb Abbeville, Amiens, Beauvais and set fire to the forests of the Ardennes: the Germans had crossed the Seine near the-sea. In four days half a million German soldiers passed a hand over the provinces of the north and north-west, a hand which scooped up towns, villages, fields, the bakery and the parish church, the children's toys and their little bodies, unwashed even for burial, the rivers, the poplars, the walnuts, the beetroots, the wheat, the vine and the house—scooped up and poured them away over their shoulders like emptying a cup. Even the wireless now gave out that the army, everywhere standing its ground, had been driven to the Seine at Rouen: another such stand would bring them beyond Rheims to the Marne. And who knew if any of it was any use? Or if the enemy, convoyed by tanks, would not be there waiting for them?

Émile Bergeot saw all these disasters cutting the tangle of his. There would be a crisis of resistance. All the intrigues and jealousies of men like Thiviers and Ernest Huet would be
shoved aside, and men of his sort would lead. It was his moment. Moment of the brave prefect of Seuilly-sur-Loire. And Seuilly a knot in the line stretched in front of the Loire, denying to the Germans the better half of France, denying them Provence and the Limousin, denying Orléans, Moulins, Limoges, Bergerac, Agen, Foix, denying the Garonne, the Vézère, the Rhöne and the black pâtés of the Dordogne. His spirits rose with the danger. The crisis was his safety, his escape from his own blunders and indiscretions and Thiviers's threats.

He shared his joy with Lucien. Ashamed to leave him, the young man asked Rienne to give him another month.

During these days Émile Bergeot was what he would have been if fate had arranged for him to be born at a time when prudence was a smaller virtue than simplicity and faith. They were his greatest days. Who knows how much accident enters into the greatness of great men, and whether Clemenceau or Joan of Arc would have been great in June 1940?

On the 10th, a Monday, he saw General Piriac at the barracks. The two men faced each other across the bare table in Piriac's room, the little civilian confident, the soldier severe and gloomy. Bergeot was astonished by the energy in Piriac's voice when he spoke of the war. The general had become older in the last week, he had reached another stage of fatigue and decay. But a spring had broken through the ground in these ruins; he talked in a firm voice about the possibility of defeat, the mistakes which had led them to disillusion and disaster, the effort to push back a steel wave with bare hands, the refugees “up there,” the fire from heaven falling on Arras, Dieppe, Havre. At any moment now it might fall on Seuilly. At this the spring sank feebly.

“I love Seuilly,” he quavered, “it's my whole life”—he meant that it was his youth and his success—“I can't bear the thought of it being destroyed.”

One egoism easily recognises another. Bergeot realised suddenly that the old general was longing—with one of those senile passions which are crueller than any youthful desire—for the moment, at the height of the tragedy, when the hero reveals himself as a king, or simply as a hero. Piriac had had his triumphs as a soldier, a little against his will, a little due to
accidents which had associated him with victories won in spite of his belief that they were going to be defeats. His final triumph was to be sent here when he should have been retired. But it was not a real triumph: neither the Government nor the General Staff ever consulted him. And he felt himself so apt to advise! . . . They'll send for me, he must be thinking; Pétain—I always supported him against the fire-eaters—will remember to send for me, I shall help him to save the country. I shall save the country! . . . The old general's ambition was so nearly a caricature of his own that Bergeot pitied him warmly. What government engaged in a desperate struggle would ask a soldier of seventy to help it? . . . This poor devil is going to be cruelly disappointed. . . . He used all his charm to recreate between them that relation of father and son which had been so useful to him in the past. He succeeded so far that Piriac tapped his cheek with a hard finger, calling him “my boy.” . . .

A film had come over the general's eyes. Pressing on every word with his full weight, he said,

“The thing now is to put an end to useless slaughter.”

Bergeot hid his pity. “Useless?”

“Quite useless. It's too late now for anything except surrender. I'm speaking to you frankly, my boy.”

Oughtn't I, Bergeot said to himself, to try and save the reputation of a brave soldier? “Even if we're beaten on the Loire there's still' the Massif Central,” he said gently. “Marseilles, the new capital of France.”

“Civilian chatter,” Piriac said curtly. “Since yesterday to talk of resisting on French soil is only ridiculous.”

“Isn't North Africa French soil?” Bergeot said. “Think, sir—that may be where we shall teach the Germans that force is not justice, tanks are not authority. . . . And the English will have come back——”

A malicious look came into Piriac's face and twitched its folds slightly. “The English? What English? I haven't seen any.” He moved his hands. “Monsieur Bergeot, last night, I dreamed——”

He stopped, and let his head sink forward. Lately, his dreams had been so vivid that he not only remembered them, but at moments during the day felt the dream hovering above him like a vulture. His dream last night was that he was speaking
at the dedication of a war monument: workmen were busy near it and he struggled madly to raise his voice above the clatter of picks; then he saw that he and the monument were in a war cemetery, the graves were being opened to take in the dead of this war, young men with their hands caught in their wounds: the air thickened and clung to him like a membrane and he woke up sobbing.

“No, no,” he mumbled, looking into the Prefect's face, “you weren't at Verdun, Monsieur Bergeot. You don't know what it was like. If you had ever lived in a graveyard, you would want to end this war before all France becomes one Verdun.”

“Wouldn't even that be better,” the Prefect said, “than its becoming one concentration camp?”

Piriac only said again, this time with contempt, “You're a civilian, you're talking nonsense.”

“None of us is altogether a civilian. I went through the last war.”

Piriac shook his head.

“As things are,” Bergeot said, “it's necessary for me to ask you for instructions. You have been advising me to do nothing.”

“I have not had any new orders,” Piriac said, with sudden clearness.

Bergeot did not believe him, and could not believe that he was lying. I ought to have seen General Woerth, he thought. . . . He was seized by arrogance which he took to be strength of will. If Piriac really has no orders, the war must be going a little better, and I have more time than I thought, he said to himself. . . . Throwing aside, in his joy, his care not to shock the old man, he told him that he had notices ready to put up, calling on the able-bodied men to enrol for rescue work in airraids, and the women as nurses and bakers. He let himself become eloquent. Seuilly would be a fortress, with as many strong points as it had houses. Its people, too busy to have time to wonder which way to run, would get themselves killed in the ruins of their houses without asking whether they could trust those shysters in Paris. “. . . they'll be thinking of the human value of their houses more than of the bed inherited from a father and to be passed on to the son conceived in it. Of course they'd rather live, but you'll see that they can still die as easily as when they were really soldiers. . . .”

A little flame moved in Piriac's eyes. He was touched.

“If I'm ordered to defend Seuilly,” he said, “I shall defend it to the end.”

“Then you'll allow me to have my volunteers——?”

“I won't forbid it. I shall pray that Seuilly will be spared.” His voice trembled. “My boy, try to be pure in heart,” he muttered, “we are being scourged, all of us, for our sins. What a disaster this war is. And what an honour for any leader brave enough to tell people the truth!”

Fumbling in the drawer of his table, he brought out a thing like a flat chestnut, half the size of his broad palm. “Look.”

“What is it?” the Prefect asked.

“A seed. The seed of some tropical plant. I used to play with it when I was a child. My sister found it last week in a camphor box and sent it to me.”

Smiling, he moved his thumb over the glossy surface. An infantile joy softened his face. “Feel it,” he murmured, laying it gently on Bergeot's hand.

Bergeot gave it back to him with an incoherent phrase. He was taken aback.