Cloudless May (68 page)

“It only needed these,” he said, pointing. “We can't even retreat like any other army. We must drag all our possessions with us, down to the most detestable of our great-aunts. And the canary. First we throw away the bridgeheads of the Somme, then the southern bank of the Seine at all the points where it's high enough to be defended by old women—and cling like heroes to our mattresses, clocks, wheelbarrows, Hispano-Suizas, sewing-machines, and so on and so on. I can do nothing, I tell you, nothing—unless you get these children and cowards off the roads. You'll see I've taken the barricades away to let them through. What is Weygand up to? Foch—when we were retreating from the Aisne, don't you remember, kept the refugees off the roads until late afternoon. You're going to tell me that Weygand isn't Foch! I know it. And 1940 isn't 1914, and France isn't France.”

“There you're wrong,” Rienne said, smiling.

“Yes, I'm wrong. But how the devil am I to use this road?”

“I'll see to it,” Rienne said. “Anything else?”

“Yes. While you're about it, please blow up the bridge into
Seuilly, and cut me off from Piriac. I want to be left in peace with my tanks and my Boches.”

Rienne laughed at him. “Dear Michel.”

“You ought to stay with me.”

“Do you want to ask me anything about your orders?” Rienne said with a sigh.

“Certainly. Why weren't they given me in May? . . .”

On his way back, Rienne told the subaltern in charge at the bridge that the refugees would be turned off the main road before they reached Seuilly. The young officer was horrified. “But it's reported that the Boches are pushing down on both sides of Seuilly. These wretched people will run slap into them—”

Rienne interrupted him. “They ought not to be here,” he said coldly. “It would have been better to stop them, even if it meant shooting a few. They're doing a great deal to lose the war.”

He went off. This child thinks I'm a brute, he said to himself.

At the barracks he gave his orders. Then he rang up the Mayor. The line was out of order. He decided to see Labenne. The traffic had been melted by the sun and was moving slowly. Suddenly a woman carrying a child stepped in front of his car. She was just not run down. Rienne spoke to her. She showed him the child's grey wrinkled face, and said, “He's dying.” Her left arm was bandaged; blood had soaked through on to the child's coat. The day before, a German airman had turned his machine-gun on the column.

“Fancy,” she said seriously, “I saw his head. He was dark.”

Rienne reflected that hers was the only blood he had seen in this war. The hospital was on his way and he helped her into his car. Catching sight of Abbé Garnier on the pavement, he beckoned him. “Come with us,” he said; he felt sorry it had to be this priest.

Before they reached the hospital, he had been forced silently to ask Garnier's pardon. Garnier had taken the child and was talking to the woman as if he lived next door to her in the village. His gestures, even his voice, belonged to a village, even when he was saying, “You must let God have this child and not grudge it to Him. They're used to children up there, it's
not as if he was going to strangers.” The woman was sitting next to Rienne: he felt her relax.

The courtyard of the hospital was like a fair-ground; the military ambulances drew in among the sweating crowd of nurses, doctors, orderlies, stretcher-bearers. No music: long agonised screams from a wounded man in one of the ambulances. It was useless to ask one of these exhausted doctors to look at a dying baby. Rienne left the two of them with Garnier—with the goodness of Garnier.

Before he reached the Town Hall he saw that Seuilly had given itself up to a nightmare. The shops were closed and in every side street cars and vans were being loaded, with a frenzied inconsequence. He recognised a face. It was Jolivet, the mathematics master. With his wife, he was pushing the last useless bundle into an overladen little car. Rienne spoke to him.

“Why are you going?”

Jolivet's face was empty of everything, except fear. “The Germans will be here in an hour. They've crossed the Loire at Nevers.”

“I assure you that's not true.”

Jolivet took no more notice. He was dazed. Almost insane with fear, he believed nothing now unless it was a lie. His wife was carrying his frock-coat; he snatched it from her and tore the ribbon of the Croix de Guerre from the buttonhole. Then he got into the car with her and drove off.

There goes a real deserter, Rienne thought. In the same moment, he felt certain that Jolivet would come back. It was a question of stretching the line a little thinly, until the gaps could be filled. . . . Suddenly he realised that something more biting than fear, even than treachery, was destroying the minds of the Jolivets. They had begun to think that France was finished. It was the emptiness frightened them. . . . A woman ran past him carrying a copy of the
New Order.
He took it from her. It was a single sheet and a single article, advising the people of Seuilly to “evacuate the town without a moment's delay. . . .”

He took it with him to Labenne, who looked at it with indifference. “What am I to do?” he asked, “the harm has been done now.”

“You can contradict it,” Rienne said. “You can go out
yourself into the streets and talk to people. I came here to ask you to do that. . . . I realise that you consider the war well lost. But I suppose you would rather Seuilly were not ruined?”

“I am helpless.”

“All the same, you will be held responsible,” Rienne said.

Labenne smiled. “Who to?”

Rienne left him. With all his distrust of Labenne, he had never understood until now that he thought of Seuilly as an unimportant stage on his road; he would push it without pity to add its drop of fear to the torrent raging in France. For the first time he saw that Labenne was not venal. He was venality itself, the anatomy of venality.

Eleven o'clock. He was hungry; he had not eaten since noon yesterday. He decided to ask Marie to make him an omelette.

Before he reached the café, he saw that there was a crowd outside it, pressed between a line of police and the wall of the embankment. He forced his way through. A policeman told him he would find the Inspector at the back of the café.

Opening the back door, he found himself in the little kitchen. The Inspector turned round quickly, his face changing when he saw that an officer had come in.

“You can help us,” he said.

“What is it?” Rienne asked.

He looked at Pierre. The young man was stretched out on the floor, bandaged round his body; a stain of blood was spreading across it: he had closed his eyes.

“He won't speak,” the Inspector said. “Hasn't opened his mouth. . . . He came home yesterday afternoon—there was a customer in the café, and he turned him out and locked the door. He didn't put the shutters up. This morning two workmen who get their breakfast here came, couldn't get in, looked in the window of the other room and saw his wife lying across their bed on her face. They could see she had been wounded. But she was dead. He must have shot her some time the night before. . . . But he's never spoken. See what you can do.”

“Leave me alone with him,” Rienne said.

The Inspector went through into the café.

Rienne waited a minute. Where was Marie? he wondered. Of course—they would have left her lying alone in the room where, he felt sure, she had as often lain awake as slept, lying
awake with her fear and her husband's absence. And Pierre who, certainly, thought little of anyone except his wife. What had happened? He sat down on the only chair and looked at him. His face was the colour of the dried earth on his uniform. He had been sleeping in ditches.

“Pierre,” Rienne said sharply.

Pierre opened his eyes. He looked at the officer without recognition, but with a slight uneasiness. He knew that when an officer spoke to him he ought at least to pay attention.

“Listen to me carefully, Pierre. We are fighting the Germans. You ought to be with your regiment. What are you doing here?”

A harassed look came into Pierre's eyes. He frowned and said—obviously it hurt him to speak, “We were beaten. The officer left.”

“And then?”

“I came home.”

“And then?”

Pierre had shut his eyes again. “Must I say?” he said under his breath.

“Certainly.”

With difficulty, Pierre said, “I had a letter. I asked her. She said, No, no—only No. She cried.”

“Where is the letter?” Rienne asked gently.

“My pocket.”

The letter was as stained as the bandage. It was written in indelible pencil, but the stain proved that there is no such thing as an indelible lead. Rienne took it to the window. He had the greatest trouble in making it out: it was to the effect—with credible detail—that Marie was sleeping with a certain Artaud; and it was signed, Your friend D. Seized by a foolish rage, he went back to Pierre.

“This isn't true,” he said.

Pierre did not speak. He turned his head to one side on the tiled floor, pressing his lips together.

The Inspector opened the door again and looked in: Rienne waved him away, then followed him into the café and showed him the letter. A police sergeant who was there read it with him; the two of them looked at it and at each other, and the Inspector nodded. He had, he told Rienne, seen one of these letters before. The young woman had probably had a letter
inviting her to write to the deputy and ask him to press the Government to make peace—

“She had,” Rienne interrupted. “She showed it to me, I told her to tear it up.”

The Inspector did not say: Then you sentenced her to be shot. But he coughed two or three times behind his hand before saying,

“If she'd done what they asked her to, her husband wouldn't have had this letter.”

Rienne steadied himself with an effort. In the same moment he felt that he had done something terrible, and that he was not responsible. He could only think of himself as a murderer if he thought of Pierre as one. He must put the whole thing out of his mind until later. But later he would perhaps have forgotten the worst of it. . . . He must risk that.

“Who are
they?”
he asked.

“Our young fascists,” said the Inspector.

“No, it's a communist trick,” his sergeant said firmly.

“One or the other,” the Inspector said.

“What are you going to do with that poor devil?”

“The hospital. He's almost sure to die. He did his best! The doctor says he has a bullet in his heart. When we move him it will probably finish him.”

Rienne went back into the kitchen. He stooped over Pierre and said,

“Pierre, my poor child, I must go. You'll be all right.”

Pierre looked at him without speaking. . . .

It was now close on midday. Thinking he had better eat something—it might be a long time before he had another chance—he walked along the, embankment, and went into Buran's. The room was crowded. He was looking at it when the loud-speaker began to say in a harsh sputtering voice that Marshal Pétain had taken over the Government. . . . A lady opening a mussel between her fingers burst into tears of joy. . . . Pétain's voice, cold, tired, trembling, the mendicant voice of Polonius.

“. . . my heart goes out to the poor refugees in their misery. . . . I give myself to France. . . . It is with a heavy heart that I say we must stop fighting. . . . I have applied to our opponent to ask him if he is ready to sign with us, as between soldiers
after the fight and in honour, a means to put an end to hostilities. . . .”

Rienne turned and went out into the street. It was badly put, he said to himself coldly; an army doesn't stop fighting before the armistice is signed.

He did not at first separate the noise of an aeroplane from the noise, like an avalanche, inside his own ears. An ambulance which had just left the bridge swerved on to the pavement as the first bomb fell. Terror pressed men and women out of cars to roll in the gutter or beat on the locked doors of shops; two wounded men climbed out of the ambulance and turned to help a third; with anger, Rienne saw driver and orderly leave them and run for shelter.

The aeroplane had gone: looking about, he could not see where the bombs had fallen. He heard more bombing going on a few miles away; after a moment he thought it was at Thouédun. When he was halfway there he saw that the village was on fire; clouds of smoke stood up like shadows painted on the white sky. His driver stopped at the foot of the hill. Refugees who were in the town when the bombing started were pouring back out of it and running into each other on the hill like an amusement park where the passengers collide in toy cars and scream with laughter. And in fact some of them were screaming.

The chauffeur pulled his car into the mill-garden out of the way, and Rienne began running up the hill. One side of the street nearest the wall was burning; under a ceiling of smoke the houses sprouted steel spirals of yellow and red flame; softer flames hung from windows, others flew up from the eaves like martins. The heat was just bearable.

He saw Letourneau at the end of the street; he was helping to carry dead and wounded out of the litter of glass into a field. Most were children, or women who had come back from the field to get his meal for a child. Some were strangers—refugees. A man lying on his face had closed his fingers over a wooden stake driven through his hand: he was dead. The little boy beside him was alive, with his poor face of fear: he was a pity with his fear: his eyes shuddered. Letourneau turned the dead peasant on to his back.

“He's one of ours.”

Rienne picked up the child. “And this one?”

“A stranger,” the priest said. “If you have time, take him to the vicarage for me. It wasn't touched.”

But Rienne took him to Agathe. He had to see that she was safe. He asked her if she had been afraid. “No,” she said, soothing the child, “I was praying for you, I thought it must be worse in Seuilly. You're really not hurt?”