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CHAPTER 1

War Came to Us

I was not sent to war. It came to me in Mézières en Drouais, a charming village west of Paris, where, for months, I had crawled upon the hills, ducked under blank shots, dug model trenches, and absorbed soporific chapters from the infantry sergeant handbook, very peacefully.

Early one June morning, with the sixty men of my training platoon, I was sketching from a hill the valley beneath, according to the military convention of perspective, when a slow column appeared in the hollow of my model: vehicles of all descriptions — buggies, farm wagons drawn by four, six, sometimes eight horses — strangely loaded. Cattle and pedestrians followed. It dragged on towards the south, uninterrupted. Then cars, with trailers and carts in tow, shot by the horses and formed a dotted line to their left.

I recognized it. It seemed to jump out of my past. Twenty-two years ago, after a maddening night of bombing, I, too, fled from the north, hauling a cart. My mother pushed, her feet soon bled. Red and blue flares and explosions tore the sky beyond the city. Enormous and scarlet, the sun came up and washed out the lights of the battle of the Somme. Then I saw that the woman ahead of us wore a dressing gown, and carried an alarm clock, a beauty kit, and a ladle. Next to her, a girl pulled a wheelbarrow with her mother in it. Bundles were piled in the emaciated arms of the old woman, but her jaw hung open. She was dead, and the bundles fell on the road, one after the other. The girl didn't know it.

This was the same fatal hemorrhage, running, flowing out of the deep wound that the invasion had, once more, inflicted on my country.

As if the exodus had propagated a plague, the villages around became devitalized. The population disappeared, deserting crops, stock, cellars.

Training was interrupted. We spent days ardently combing the woods for parachutists, and found none. Formed into regular companies, we expected to leave for the front, and were eager to fight; but our train never came. On the ninth of June, the next railway station, at Dreux, was neatly sprinkled with bombs by fifteen German dive bombers, hardly bothered by a weak antiaircraft fire. Where were the Allied airplanes? We never saw them any more. German observation planes took their place above us, and strafed us a bit, every day, for fun.

Paper headlines swelled enormously: Treason ...

Our officers became nervous. Old reserve Major Galois ordered every road stopped by antitank blockades. Ridiculous obstacles of cobblestones and farm machinery were hastily built which any large tank could push away.

Men took to drinking so much that the two remaining cafés were ordered closed. Over the radio, I heard Reynaud say that a miracle was necessary to save France. He called on America for help.

On the eve of the thirteenth, a lieutenant of my platoon, of whom I was very fond, took me aside and told me that the Germans were hardly twenty miles away, advancing rapidly after breaking the main line of resistance. The order had come at last that all troops should evacuate Mézières the next morning, except a rear-guard of fifty men entrusted with the defense of the village. My lieutenant was to take command of it. Would I volunteer to stay with him?

"Yes, of course."

We were to be given two machine guns and two sub-machine guns, but no heavy weapon. If we hid well and waited until the Germans came near, we might cause them some damage, puzzle them a bit, and slow them down for three hours, until they had cleaned us up from the air, and with field mortars. The mission completed, some of us might escape over the hills, through the woods. Perhaps.

I felt hot in the head. It is so good to know that one is going to do one's best, come what may.

But in the night, the order was cancelled and, by the same valley road over which had swept the influx of refugees, we left at daybreak, in good order, full pack on the back.

Days of Rout

June 14.

One has to learn to walk fully loaded. It is not so much a question of strength, as a question of suppleness. With the knapsack well installed on the shoulders, one projects the body over one leg and then over the other, smoothly. It is as if the legs were moving under oneself like a different part, gliding, rolling.

The charge must stay horizontal. Any up and down motion of the shoulders absorbs energy. The straps are devils. They cut the shoulders, the chest, the belly. There are quantities of them, from the gun, the bags, the canteen, the gas masks, crossing, overlapping. One breathes low, so as not to shake them.

With the cartridges, the blanket, the spare shoes, the reserve food, the tools, one carries fifty, sixty pounds, not to mention the "utility gifts" from the family. I had, besides, a handsome American leather brief-case full of books and drawings. My shoes were new; my feet soon cut.

A thick fog followed the night. What luck! Nothing to fear from above. We plodded mile after mile. The first twelve or fifteen are always the hardest. One has to tear through one's own crust of stiffness, weakness, laziness. When all the muscles warm up, each gliding gently over the other, carrying its own share of the total burden, it ceases to be painful. One becomes part of the column. The cadence of the steps lifts up your legs. At the first few halts one gets busy with talcum powder, adhesive tape, rubbing oil. For the toes, there is nothing better than tallow. One soon decides that one has no use for this book, or that fancy kit. "Who wants it? No one?" It lands in the ditch.

After twenty miles, we reached a railroad station. The station master was sore and sorry. The tracks had been accurately bombed from the air that very morning, as if the Germans knew that we were to embark there. He was left alone. The freight cars had rolled over the bank and smashed up the cattle awaiting shipment. Surviving animals had galloped madly away, with bloody bits hanging from their horns.

We took to the road again, now clean of all traffic, as if reserved for us; and six or seven miles farther, in the darkest night, we stopped in a village, invaded the barns and fell asleep.

June 15.

"Everybody up." What? It is still night, we have been here only a couple of hours. Hot coffee will be served in the yard. That sounds better. But where are my things, my gun, my gas mask, my bags, my bayonet, the whole mess? Fumbling in the dark — flashlights are strictly forbidden. Through any crack in the roof they would show at a great height. Hell! My mistake. This is not a barn, but a stable! Then a woman screamed. I had stepped on her face. Apparently some refugees had crawled in, too, and just lay anywhere.

Soon we were on the road again, each company now a full fifteen minutes behind the other. My feet felt much better. I had feared I could not carry on last night, but with the blisters opened, well patched, the shoes broken in, the top part discreetly split with my knife, I could manage.

We followed railroad tracks. Smoking was prohibited. No lights, you know! But at a curve, a splendid red light burst above the tracks, bloody in the dark. I was sent up to see; nothing but a regular stop signal. The lieutenant thought that it meant the tracks had been blown up beyond. Mighty strange! He would not let me shoot at it. No instructions, to do so, he said. A reserve officer is a timid soul, after he has made a couple of enthusiastic blunders. In the Army you are supposed to do nothing beyond your particular mission. There was another station, he said, a couple of hours away. He believed that we would be given new orders there, and were likely to be shipped south, and then sent up to where some strong line of resistance was being completed. He mentioned the River Loire.

No! What kind of a joke is this? They cannot have let the Germans pass the River Seine. It could only be a few advanced elements that had crossed it, and they should have been annihilated quickly. But why was it that as we went west towards Chartres, the few civilians left in the streets were old, and looked desperate?

Since yesterday we had passed many small towns, or villages that recalled lovely souvenirs of my old hikes: Roman churches, Renaissance city halls, blue mail boxes with 1830-type inscriptions, cafés with marinated eels and dry Touraine wine. To M ... I had come once last month, to deliver a message for one of Darlan's officers. Naval general headquarters had been installed right here. Now, all windows were closed, shutters latched, and papers littered the street. No café open, no newspaper to be found. I could not make out what a distant radio was blaring forth about Paris: "Yesterday at ... the Germans ..." Had the hogs bombed it?

But the roads were gay. There were flowers, trees, spots of oil and horse dung. The birds had no bad news to twitter.

In a thicket sat two girls, blonde and red, hatless, looking pretty. The boy ahead of me turned his head, left the ranks, calling to the lieutenant that he had to take off his shoe. The girls, laughed. Somebody behind me said that he made for the thicket. I do not remember seeing him again.

Not two, but six hours later, we arrived at a station. The road crossed the tracks. There were two immensely long trains of platform cars, loaded with armored cars, guns, brand-new superb material. It always makes you proud to meet neat war machinery, well painted, with white numbers, so businesslike. You feel that if you are given this, no enemy shall ever get the best of you. It looks so invincible.

There seemed to be something the matter. Though the four locomotives steamed, they did not move. And then, funny little points in the sky, too well-known, appeared, three by three, a dozen in all. They became bigger and bigger. We were ordered to scatter promptly into the fields and lie quiet. The planes dived, six of them, roared enormously and let loose. The bombs whistled. In a certain light, you could see them coming down, just after being released. Then you would duck, sure that they were aimed directly at you. The noise of bomb explosions is terrific, clattering. When it stops, your ears throb and the earth vibrates. Then stones, bricks, torn-off bits landing at last, make a gentler clatter. Next, somebody screams. Last comes the smell of powder. The planes taking height again, the humming of the engines will quiet down to a peculiar waving roar until they dive again.

Behind me, Corporal Marais, my comrade in training, his eyes out of his head, muttered: "I can't stand it; I can't stand it!"

Somebody said: "Ta gueule." (Shut up!)

It is strange how one reacts to fear. Everyone feels something. One out of ten becomes paralyzed. The rich, untranslatable, Army slang says: "ll a les miches qui font bravo" or "ll a le trou du cul a zero."

When the bombs whistle, I get a cold sensation in the lower backbone; later, it climbs to my neck, and I become angry: I want to fight.

Where were the officers? In that station, on those trains, no antiaircraft or, if any, nobody to man it! To protect them, it would have taken at least four quick firing guns. Where were our famous 90 Schneiders, which could shoot eight miles up? Where were the batteries of sharp 25's, or the new 47's, or even the old brutal 75's? All sent where the final stand was going to be, no doubt. And where were our machine guns? Somewhere beyond, with the other company! They are not much good against fast planes, unless coupled, and provided the planes fly low. They will dissuade planes from strafing, though.

Where are the lieutenants, the captain? Couldn't we do something? Men here and there started shooting at the planes uselessly, but it relieved our nerves. Then, orders were passed from haystack to hole, from hedge to tree; "Don't shoot, or they'll come after us." Too late! Two of them plunged, gracefully, and the roaring became enormous. Tatatata. The machine guns clapped the road, where some trucks had stopped, the drivers hidden underneath. Two caught fire, and the burning men ran.

The bullets whistle and render a different sound according to the objects hit. Brief, shrill, dry, vibrating, or soft when they bury themselves in flesh. Dust, little bits of pavement, torn off pieces of stone or wood fly around.

"I can't stand it, I can't stand it," shrieked Marais, again. I smacked him. He said: "Thank you. I can't help it." A good fellow, Marais, a grocer, from a small town, somewhere.

So we were not going to board a train here. When the planes left us, they had done little damage to our scattered company. A few scratches. The railroad tracks were completely smashed on both sides of the station. The trains themselves had suffered little, but would stay there. It was none of our business, apparently, for we formed again, and marched to the village, far beyond the station, where we found stragglers from the other companies, and a good warm soup.

The village was empty, except for a few groups of refugees, silent, eating or sleeping on the side of the road. I found a house open. It was poor. There was some coffee in the pot, and I drank it. It tasted fresh. I washed and greased my feet, and endeavored to lighten my pack. On the mantelpiece I felt a beautiful Saint Augustin and a Life of Eric Satie; in a closet, a soiled shirt, a pair of pajamas, and some odd things.

The company staff looked puzzled, and grieved, around old Major Galois the creator of the funny antitank blockade, at Mézières. He wore a white beard, on a kind face. It was decided that we would not march any longer in company formation, but by isolated groups, and we were given the meeting point and general directions.

With a dozen of my friends from what was, a few days before, a brisk, shiny-looking training unit of noncommissioned officers, all but I bearing the pretty stripes of corporal, I left by a back road. We had reached that degree of fatigue where one can hardly carry more than a thought. To go on, was our only thought then.

We loaded our sacks on a small carriage found in a back yard. Half of us pulling and pushing, the others walking ahead, and whistling a song, from time to time.

* * *

The tallest of the group, Ernest, had fought, as top sergeant, in Morocco, sixteen years ago, and in the Sarre. He had been degraded for some minor scandal: fight with an officer, drunkenness, that kind of mistake. I thought that I could rely on him, eventually, for advice. It was so hot that, against all regulations, we laid our heavy mantles on the sacks. I was in favor of advancing as fast as possible, but the others complained they could not; and we had to stay together.

At a farm, one of those fine buildings where all the roofs turn around a central yard, with a warm dung pile in the center, we stopped. We wanted a lighter carriage. All the doors were open, but no farmer answered our calls. I looked around for a road map, but found only a sketchy sort of regional map on the back of a calendar. I tore it off.

Hearing a noise above, we climbed the stairs and found a young man, and a girl helping him pull off his boots. He wore a swanky uniform, and said in good French that he was a Flemish officer, from the Belgian Army; that he had escaped through the German lines, met his wife in Paris where the Germans had arrived yesterday; that, as far as he was concerned, the fight was over, Leopold having capitulated. He had found some civilian clothes in a closet, and would put them on. He invited us to do the same. "What's the use?" He said. "We are all betrayed anyway!" Indignant, none of us would imitate him.

We left them in the attic. No carts in the barn, no cattle, no chickens, no old, lame dog. A plague-stricken place. So lovely, though, so architectural; as abstract as a geometrical perspective on paper that always misses looking alive.

Back on the road, I found that Ernest had collected some bottles of brandy. I didn't like it very much, but I took a sip, and it did me good. There was a heavy cannonade north and east of us. Thank God, there was a line! That Belgian fellow did not know what he was saying. We should have taken him along, with his boots and his unattractive mate, and made him repeat his statements at headquarters. But there were so many civilians from the north, Belgium, Holland, who had said such things as we passed by.

Planes bearing German markings passed us, continually. We did not stop any more. If they began machine-gunning us, we could crouch under the pushcart. Nothing better to stop a bullet than a packed knapsack, except a sack of loose earth.

We saw a pack of bleating sheep, two or three hundreds of them. They had shaved the ground completely, and looked famished. Who had left them there? I wished we had time to kill one and roast it. We let them loose. The foolish flock stayed together, and followed us for a while. Then Corporal Durand said that they would stuff themselves with green grass and burst their bellies. He knew. He was a farmer, wrinkled, with an ample mustache, a heavy torso, short legs, no neck. From western Normandy, certainly. I felt badly. Perhaps we had done the wrong thing.

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Excerpted from "They Shall Not Have Me"
by .
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