The Foundling's War (3 page)

‘No thanks.'

He would never again be able to swallow another mouthful. The smell of blood and human flesh clung to him, and he gagged again, all the more painfully because his stomach was empty. He leant against a tree and stayed there for a long time, staring at a landscape as blurred as the sea bed. Picallon gobbled down three tins of corned beef, a litre of wine, and an entire loaf of bread. The enemy machine gun, still close by, was regularly audible, firing at random in the direction of the canal bank where Boucharon had decided to see how events turned out. Turning away so as not to see the other two gorging
themselves, Jean walked into the house. A headquarters map was spread out on the kitchen table, dotted with white and red flags as if for a lesson at the École de Guerre. In their scramble to retreat the staff had left behind the stock of flags, a pair of binoculars, a swagger stick, even a monocle attached to its black string. Jean looked for their canal position on the map and understood why the Germans had not attacked. They had settled for a flanking movement via a bridge ten kilometres downstream. Alerted, the command post had ordered a withdrawal so hasty that only the NCOs had known about it. But the map indicated the local paths as well, and the enemy could not be in possession of all of them. If they moved at night or kept to the woods, they would eventually rejoin the French lines. As propositions went, it was optimistic but not so absurd as to be impossible. Nor would it be the first optimistic proposition formulated by members of the French army since 10 May 1940.

Lacking communications and at the mercy of idiotic wireless broadcasts and a hopeless romanticism, France, its retreating army and its refugees lived in a whirlwind of rumours and lies that, despite the majority being instantly refutable, ricocheted from village to village and unit to unit. The strategic discussions at a thousand Cafés du Commerce had never been blessed by such a unanimous belief in success before, and as the retreat gathered momentum a veritable torrent of misinformation received the same serious consideration: the very night of the German forces' entry into Paris, Hitler had gone to the Opéra to hear
Siegfried
and gliders had dropped a battalion of parachutists disguised as nuns on the outskirts of Tours, where they had taken control of the aerodrome without firing a shot; other parachutists disguised as farm workers were giving false directions to the French armoured division and sending it straight into the lion's den; Roosevelt was about to make available to France and Great Britain five hundred fighters and more than a thousand bombers, with aircrew; a famous singer had been shot: her coded songs broadcast on the wireless had given away troop numbers at the Maginot line; two
trains filled with gold ingots were going to buy Mussolini's neutrality; the German armoured division had only a day's fuel left and the bombing of the Ruhr was causing strikes in the armament factories; some units were already running out of ammunition; in any case, the president of the Council had announced with a tremor in his voice that ‘Germany's iron supply line has been cut' and it had not a gram of steel left.

Jean went outside again, map in hand. Using a spirit stove Picallon was heating up some coffee he had found in a flask, and Palfy was coming back, smiling broadly at his discovery: a hundred metres away, in the shelter of birch woods, were two working tankettes with trailers stuffed with mines, sub-machine guns and ammunition. The tankettes, with which the French army had been supplied in abundance for want of battle tanks, had been assembled at high speed at arsenals to the south of the Loire and lined up under the proud gaze of sergeant-majors to be counted and re-counted. They had proved utterly useless. They looked like cartoon tanks, the kind of thing rich men's children might play with on the family estate. What terrifying toys they could have been in childish, cruel hands, flattening hens under their tracks, crippling the children of the poor!

With the turret raised, there was room for two inside each one. Picallon could not drive and in any case his height – close to six foot three – made him too big to fit into a tankette. He settled himself on the bonnet of Jean's instead, accepting, as a consolation, a new sub-machine gun still covered with the oil applied by the regimental armourer, who must have relinquished it only under the most extreme duress.

The convoy jerked into motion, heading south on a forest track through the woods. The tankettes advanced slowly, doing ten kilometres an hour at best. Sheltered by summer foliage and twice cutting across roads that helped serve as landmarks, they reached the edge of the forest where they were forced to move without cover through a hot, empty landscape in which the hay roasted by the June
sun was starting to wilt. Three Stukas passed overhead, way up, at well over a thousand metres, mission accomplished, dazzling birds in the midday sun. The road led through a deserted hamlet, then a second where, suddenly, a scarcely human form emerged from a doorway, a ball of sound slumped in a wheelchair. The man was working the wheelchair's wheels desperately, trying to get away from a pack of excited dogs. Picallon slid off the bonnet and walked towards the invalid. He had been abandoned there with a plate of rice and bread and water that he was protecting, groaning inarticulately, from the starving dogs. At twenty paces he reeked of excrement and urine. Picallon stepped back.

‘What do I do?' he asked.

‘Kill the dogs before they make a meal of him!' Palfy ordered.

The sub-machine gun silenced the wheelchair's famished attackers, and Picallon nudged the corpses into a ditch with his boot. The man shrieked with joy and clapped.

‘That's enough, young priest, you can't do any more!'

‘It's disgusting.'

‘No going soft. Come on.'

They set off again, and the man in the wheelchair tried for a moment to follow them, burping and coughing in the cloud of dust and exhaust gases. Re-seated on the tankette's bonnet, Picallon began to heat up as if he was being grilled and started to pray aloud to St Lawrence, offering his apologies for not hitherto having appreciated his martyrdom. Jean, having familiarised himself with the tankette's various directional levers, was following the tracks made by Palfy, who had dived into a series of dusty paths bordered by yellowed, overripe wheat and parched grass. The harvest of 1940 was superb, but there were no men to take it in. From time to time across the fields they saw the distant figures of women in white headscarves, cutting wheat by hand and forking the crop into carts drawn by Percherons whose coats trickled with sweat. But no one turned to watch the two strange vehicles lurching noisily into and out of view in plumes of
dust. Jean felt an intoxicating sense of freedom. No more yapping NCOs to order pathetically inadequate defensive fire or a premature withdrawal. He and crazy Palfy were going on holiday, to tour France's agricultural heartland and discover its bistros where the
patronne
, in vowels as round as her hips, served ‘her'
pâté de campagne
, ‘her' beef stew, ‘her' local wine and the pears from ‘her' garden. But the farms looked like the
Mary Celeste
, the famous brigantine discovered still under sail in the middle of the ocean, without a crew, with breakfast served on the table, the fire still lit in the galley and not a soul on board. They stopped at some of these farms and called out, and no one came. There might be a dog barking, pigs snuffling in the rubbish, cows with swollen udders mooing in the pastures, but apart from the few women they glimpsed, busy bringing in the wheat, France had been emptied of its population by the wave of a magic wand, with the single exception of a disabled man in a wheelchair whom the pigs would eventually deal with too, for lack of anything better to eat.

His mouth painfully dry from the dust, his stomach empty, his head burning, and still with the taste of his exhausting nausea on his tongue, Jean's mind began to wander. The war was ending just when it could have become amusing and comfortable, riding in this tracked contraption after having marched themselves to a standstill ever since the Ardennes, chasing the ghosts of promised trucks that would miraculously allow the regiment to rest and re-form. But the trucks had archives of documents to save, tons and tons of archives that headquarters were relying on to exact their revenge one day.

The first evening they broke open the door of an abandoned farm. A slab of butter still sat on the pantry shelf. Picallon, brought up in the country, milked the cows and brought a jug of cream to the table. They found ham and
saucisson
in the cellar, and some bottles of light red wine and apples. Unmade beds told of a hasty flight. Palfy went looking for bedsheets and found piles of them in a cupboard; picking up a sheet, he rubbed the linen between his thumb and index finger.

‘Obviously it's not satin, and there's no trace of a monogram. But
the mistress of the house washes her own linen and hangs it to dry in the meadow. Even in London you won't find whiteness like this any more. We must make do. In any case we have no right to ask for too much, my friends. I must remind you that there's a war on, in case you've forgotten, for youth is terribly forgetful.'

‘You're amazing,' Picallon said. ‘You've seen everything, you know everything. Without you we'd either be dead or have been taken prisoner.'

‘Perhaps I'm actually God!' Palfy suggested, modestly.

‘No, definitely not, I know you're not Him. I may be naive, but I'm not that naive.'

Night was falling. They lit candles and stuck them in glasses on the big table in the main room.

‘Look at us, back in the good old days at Eaton Square all over again,' Jean said. ‘All that's missing is Price and his white gloves.'

Picallon was astonished that his friends had seen so much of the world. He was particularly dazzled by Palfy, who was way beyond the experience of a country boy from the Jura. He watched in amazement as Palfy laid spoons to eat the melons that he had cut in half and scooped out.

‘My dear Picallon,' Palfy said, his voice tinged with regret, ‘I know that at your seminary no one would ever have dared to serve melon without port. Unfortunately I've run out. My butler drank it one evening when his boyfriend cheated on him. I sacked him of course, but the damage is done and there's not even a drop of white wine left to help you save this melon. Just this red which, incidentally, as you'll note at once, has the same lightness as your Jura wines. I hope you won't be cross with me for inviting you and offering you such simple fare …'

Picallon was not cross with him at all. He found the entire dinner marvellous, down to the candles that cast the room's soot-blackened chimney, post office calendar and portrait photo of a lance-corporal in the engineer corps into gloomy oblivion. The war had been banished
and no longer filled their thoughts. Around midnight they stumbled on a bottle of what they thought might be plum brandy.

‘When you're a bishop—' Palfy said.

‘Me a bishop! Not ruddy likely. I don't like tricky situations. As you're my witness, I shall be a priest and stay a priest …'

‘You lack ambition.'

‘Ambition is a sin.'

‘Picallon, you're an imbecile.'

‘Yes, maybe I am, but you're too clever, you know too many things. Doesn't he, Jean?'

‘No. Palfy doesn't know anything. He guesses it all. And because he doesn't know anything, he dreams up fabulous schemes that make him a multimillionaire one day and a conman the next.'

‘Conman is harsh,' Palfy said without irritation.

Picallon, his mind opened to life's great adventures by the plum brandy, wondered whether the things he had been taught at the seminary still meant something. The invader was trampling France – the Church's elder daughter – underfoot, and of his only two friends one was disenchanted and the other a conman. His mind a little fogged by alcohol, he tried to work out whether it was all a very good joke, or a dream inspired by the Great Tempter.

‘You're mocking me, both of you,' he said. ‘You're incapable of being serious …'

And he went to bed, in a bedroom that smelt of wax and straw dust, which was a reassuring atmosphere for a country lad from the Jura.

We shall not elaborate now (or later for that matter) on the conversation that took place between Jean and Palfy after Picallon had gone to bed. More serious than usual, it went on until around two in the morning, after a last glass of plum brandy. The bottle was empty. To find another they would have had to break down the cellar door
and they were neither vandals nor looters, just soldiers abandoned by a republic in flight. A minimum of careful thought was vital. Where had the French army gone? Even in the absence of official news, it was plain to see it had evaporated. The worst part was that there did not seem to be a German army either.

Standing on the doorstep, admiring the warm starry night that enveloped the farm and the countryside, Palfy sighed.

‘If we were genuine optimists,' he said, ‘we'd be imagining that both armies have put the wind up each other. The Germans have turned round and nipped back across their beloved Rhine to stroke their Gretchens with their blond plaits, and the French have laid down their rifles and put in for their paid holidays, a month's leave on the Côte d'Azur …'

‘I wouldn't mind going down to Saint-Tropez myself …'

He thought of Toinette and the sweet letter she had written him when he enlisted. But dreaming was forbidden! Palfy reminded him of it every time he weakened, and did not fail to do so this time as well.

‘My dear boy, one doesn't sleep with one's aunt. It's no more unhealthy than sleeping with anyone else, but it may bring misfortune on your head. Now is the time to be superstitious again, believe me. I would not have messed up my last two projects in London and Cannes so stupidly if I'd paid attention to certain signs …'

‘You'll never fail to make me laugh,' Jean said. ‘Let's go to bed. Tomorrow—'