The Foundling's War (2 page)

‘Yes, we mustn't forget it. One day, Tuberge, one day I'll have your guts for garters. When I think about that poor priest …'

The night had been calm except for a few volleys of tracer rounds fired over the canal, mostly either to let off steam or soothe nerves, or just for the pleasure of emptying a magazine and watching a salvo describe a clutch of luminous parabolas like a storm of meteorites in the warm June air. Early dawn light spread along the canal's banks. A trickle of water carried with it planks of wood, a hat, a dead cow with a monstrously distended stomach and a pair of corpses, two men tied together at the wrist and obligingly floating on their stomachs to hide their mortified expressions. Then, from out of nowhere, a fat, bare-headed priest appeared on the enemy side of the canal, walking along the towpath and reading his prayer book. His incomprehensible appearance seemed to cause time to stop, forcing a respite at the exact moment when the fighting was due to restart.

‘It's a truce from God!' Picallon, the seminarian, said, and for once no one laughed at him.

A damp freshness enveloped the numb men in their hastily constructed dugouts. Mosquitoes had devoured their hands and exposed faces. Lance-Corporal Astor had woken up blind, his eyelids swollen and stuck together with pus. He was led off to the command post, where a hypothetical ambulance was waiting. Jean and Palfy, smeared with lemon juice, had escaped the onslaught and subsequent wholesale itching. The priest followed the towpath, hard by the water's edge, as far as a destroyed footbridge, where he turned round and, with his nose still in his prayer book, retraced his steps. The last shreds of grey night were drifting away in the sky. The cleric's florid face was visible, as was his unkempt white hair and too-short cassock that revealed a pair of skinny calves ending in stout ankle boots very like those worn by the abbé Le Couec.

Behind the group to which Jean and Palfy belonged, Sergeant Tuberge and Lance-Corporal Pomme had dug themselves a comfortable hole which they had reinforced with planks and sandbags. Thirty metres to the rear of his men, Tuberge claimed it was a good command post because he could receive orders from the main CP without endangering a runner. In reality it was clear that his location would, at the first sign of trouble, allow him to take to his heels down a well-protected trench, at the end of which lay one of those elastic positions so beloved by communiqué writers at headquarters. But Tuberge, a loudmouth well skilled in the boasting arts, still managed to impress with his physical presence and underworld vocabulary. A one-time lathe and milling-machine operator at Renault, he had prepared himself for battle by wreaking havoc among the female population of the villages where the regiment had been billeted during the phoney war. Jean and Palfy had not been surprised to find that the first shots fired in anger had revealed the sergeant's possession of a hitherto unsuspected virtue: enormous caution.

The priest once again about-turned, impervious to the threatening
silence that accompanied his reading and private prayers. He was like a tightrope walker exorcising his vertigo at the war to right and left and keeping his balance on the high wire with a long pole, in this case, his prayer book, the word of the Church. At that hour, with the day still undecided, a priest's innocence and the word of the Church seemed truly supernatural. They held the guns silent, forbade bloodshed, and returned to its state of French grace the whole tract of peaceful countryside whose colours were beginning to awaken. Everyone felt the moment, except for Tuberge, who grumbled something about fifth columnists and parachutists disguised as priests, then picked up a light machine gun and raked the black cassock with a volley of fire. The priest's hands flew to his flushed face, and his body, after a moment's hesitation, toppled into the canal, joining the dead cow whose horns had become tangled in the weeds. As the echo of the machine gun died away a sudden breeze sprang up, rippling the surface of the canal. The cow moved off again, dragging the priest behind, his wet cassock floating just below the surface.

‘Bastard!' Picallon yelled, standing up in his dugout and shaking his fist at Tuberge.

‘You shit, it'll be your turn next!' Palfy shouted in the sergeant's direction.

Tuberge prudently kept his head down, but shouted back, ‘The next one to complain gets a bullet in the back of the neck from me.'

‘Do we shoot him?' Jean asked in a low voice.

‘He won't show himself,' Palfy answered. ‘He may even be making his way to the rear at this very moment.'

Five hundred metres away on the far bank, from behind a half-ruined wall, a machine gun fired several rounds and jammed. Silence fell again between the lines, as if death were taking a last deep breath before exhaling its fire across the meadow and through the willows. Everything looked frozen: the cumulus clouds in the pale sky, the canal's greenish-black water, the leaves in the trees and the tall grass stained with the red spots of poppies that had been winking there
since sunrise. The stillness might have carried on for an eternity if a crow had not suddenly swooped low over the canal, attracted by the corpses that floated there. Someone muttered that it must be the priest's soul, as the crow settled on a willow branch, but the priest's soul must have been as cursed as his body. The first mortar struck the willow, splitting it in two, and the blast scattered black crow feathers in every direction. Shells began falling far beyond the canal, behind Jean and Palfy, shredding trees and blasting funnel-shaped craters out of the meadow. Then a salvo hit the canal, sending up geysers of brackish water. Progressively the range was adjusted until at last it started pounding the bank held by the French in their foxholes. For an hour, shells arced through the sky, emitting soft whistles as they fell. They could be seen climbing merrily, twisting as they rose, then gliding and hesitating, as if choosing their targets, and boring their way down through the air to land in a spray of earth, grass and stones, their dull thud as they burst putting an end to fear.

For no discernible reason, the mortars fell silent. The Germans failed to show themselves. Trees and bushes were ablaze. At eight in the morning the sun was already sweltering. Packed into their foxholes, their necks protected by their packs, Tuberge's group was sweating as much from fear as heat. The corpses of the cow and the priest had disappeared. In their wake drifted dead branches, a boater, and a cutter with a smashed gunwale. Palfy raised his helmet on the tip of a bayonet, but no one shot at it and he crawled gingerly out of the foxhole. On the far side of the canal, in the deserted meadow, the wind was bending the tall grass.

‘Tuberge,' he called.

Nothing.

‘Maybe he's been blown to bits,' someone said with unconcealed joy.

‘I'd hate to miss that,' Picallon said, crawling towards the sergeant's shelter.

There was no one in the shelter but it was piled high with tinned
food, wine and ammunition. On a plank Tuberge had pinned a photo of a donkey with an erection sodomising an enormous Hindu woman.

‘They've cleared off!' Picallon shouted.

‘Try and get hold of the command post.'

The seminarian disappeared down the trench. He returned two minutes later.

‘Scarpered! With the 75.'

The 75's disappearance was no news to anyone. Ever since war had been declared the self-propelled field gun, commanded by a reservist officer cadet, seemed to have had as its principal objective staying out of sight of the enemy. With three shells it could have silenced their mortars, but that would have meant risking an artillery piece destined to feature in a museum with a caption that read: ‘75mm cannon, having succeeded throughout the war of 1939–40 in not aggravating relations – already very bad at that time – between Albert Lebrun's France and Adolf Hitler's Germany'.

‘We're buggered!' Noël, a railway worker who was always depressed, said. ‘`We'll have to surrender. Who's got something white we can wave?'

‘Not on your life,' said Pastoureau. ‘The Krauts don't take prisoners. If I have to die either way, I'm for scarpering too. But who's going to take command?'

‘You, Palfy, you're the oldest!' Joël Tambourin, a Breton, declared.

‘All right,' Palfy said, having expected the nomination. ‘Jean will be my NCO.'

‘What's happening?' Picallon called from his hole. ‘What are we doing?'

‘Palfy's taken over command!' Tambourin yelled back with the joy of a man who had been liberated. ‘We've got a chief!'

Palfy smiled and murmured, ‘The frogs need their prince.'

Jean crawled across open ground to the next foxhole. For some incomprehensible reason, the Germans were holding their fire. The other group was dug in about twenty metres away. Jean hailed them.
Getting no answer and tired of crawling, he got to his feet, ran and jumped into the hole: into a tangle of pulverised heads and crushed faces, of men whose spilt guts were already attracting flies. Two, possibly three mortars had fallen directly into the shelter and Jean found himself floundering in a pulp of blood, shredded flesh, and pieces of bone. His right boot finished the job of crushing a man's chest. As he pulled it free, he pulled white ribs away with it and squashed the heart, from which thick black blood trickled. A ghastly nausea gripped him, and his whole body seemed to turn over in an excruciating pain that affected his arms and legs, as if his own life was being dragged out of him by giant pincers. He vomited not just the hunk of bread and corned beef he had eaten during the night, but all the food he had ever eaten, all his innards, his blood, his saliva, his snot. Intolerable throbbing drilled into his temples as he shut his eyes and clawed at the parapet to try to get out of the hole and flee the horror. Standing up, casting all caution to the winds, he wanted to run but collapsed, his foot caught in a length of someone's guts. A machine-gun volley rattled over his head and his mouth was filled with earth.

‘Crawl, you bloody idiot!' Palfy shouted.

Jean disentangled his foot and, green and trembling, let himself drop into the foxhole, where Palfy broke his fall.

‘Well …? Oh, I see. Right.'

Palfy in turn crept to the nearest position in the opposite direction, which was better protected by a parapet, but there the men had decamped, abandoning kit and ammunition. Another machine-gun volley punctuated his return.

‘Nothing for it but to do the same.'

‘Forget it. I'm not moving,' Boucharon said. ‘All things considered, I'm all right here. Demob!'

‘I'm going,' Palfy said. ‘If I make it to Picallon I'll cover you.'

He climbed out. The enemy machine gun fired, kicking up dry sprays of earth around him, but he reached Picallon and set up the light machine gun.

‘Doesn't fill me with joy,' Noël said.

‘You'd have to be mad!' Boucharon added.

‘Would it fill you with joy if I get across?' Jean asked.

‘Maybe.'

Jean got across. A bullet ricocheted and hit his heel, another holed his jacket.

‘Three of us! The holy trinity!' Picallon said, laughing uproariously and helping Jean back to an upright position.

‘Your turn, Noël,' Palfy called.

The machine gun scythed through Noël's spine when he was halfway across. He did not even flinch, just fell with his face flat on the ground. His fingers untensed and slid away from his rifle. Tambourin, whose turn it was next, hesitated at the shelter's edge, then scrambled forward, crawling level with the immobile body. Palfy's light machine gun discharged a magazine over his head towards the invisible German machine gun, which responded with a volley of bullets that riddled the earthwork of Tuberge's shelter just as Tambourin was sliding into it. Palfy caught a dead man in his arms. He placed him in the bottom of the foxhole and sat him up. His face was already waxen, his lips pulled back to reveal his gums.

‘Palfy?' Boucharon called from the shelter.

‘Yes.'

‘What happened to Tambourin?'

‘You want to know?'

‘Yes.'

‘Dead.'

‘In that case, all things considered, I'm staying put. They're not cannibals, the Germans, after all. Demob!'

‘Please yourself!'

And so Boucharon, who had been expecting to throw away his uniform that day, kept it for another five years. On the other hand, he travelled and got to know the camps of Poland, Silesia and Württemberg where, working as a farmhand, he impregnated the
wife of a farmer who was freezing at Stalingrad. Not the worst life he might have had, as he admitted, free of worries, his board guaranteed, and plenty of available women. He talked about it for the rest of his life after he got back to his family in Creuse, over whom the war had passed without a trace. From time to time, he still roared, ‘Demob!' when he had drunk a bit too much at the Café des Amateurs, but no one knew what demobilisation he was talking about, and nor did he. For a few years after he got back he dreamt of his German companion, of her delicious breasts and her strong smell of milk after she had been milking, but the memory gradually faded and he arrived by degrees at a princely state of apathy for everything that did not belong to his little world of food, wine and work on the farm, where he lived alone with his dogs, cows and two pigs. In which case let us speak of him no longer (in any case his role in this story is about as episodic as it could be) and return to Palfy, Jean and Picallon who, having bid Boucharon, huddled in his hole, farewell, reached a long hedge and then a clearing that they crossed on their stomachs, and finally a sheep pen next to a duck pond. This had been the command post. A table set up outside the door was still strewn with tins of corned beef and sardines, red wine and country bread, and cigars.

‘I'm hungry,' Picallon said. ‘I could eat a horse.'

‘Eat, young priest, eat. I shall keep you company. What about you, Jean?'