The Surgeon and the Shepherd: Two Resistance Heroes in Vichy France

The Surgeon and the Shepherd

University of Nebraska Press

Chapter One

When Manech (Basque for "Jean") left his pastoral mountain valley for the western front, his life had just begun as a shepherd-in-residence to his older sister and brother-in-law. Longstanding tradition in rural Basque society was a system of inheritance that transferred all of a family's ancestral assets - its homestead, furniture, land holdings, and rights - to one offspring. Usually the eldest child became the resident jaun (lord) under whose roof the rest of the family lived and worked. Other siblings simply received a monetary bequest to stake out their futures. Emigration to the Americas, preparation for the priesthood, or apprenticeship as a village artisan were the alternative avenues for Basque sons seeking independence and opportunity away from home, while lifelong security, servitude, and bachelorhood were the realities for thosewho stayed behind. Lacking ambition, Jean remained in the family fold.

Like the other young men from the neighboring villages of Lecumberry and Behorleguy called up in 1914 to serve in World War I, for Jean leaving the Laurhibar Valley must have been an adventure in itself. Until then his peasant geography was circumscribed by the landscape that his feet had traveled since boyhood: leading flocks from the valley to high pastures for the annual transhumance; crisscrossing animal paths along the upland meadows with the sheep in search of food; traversing the border in the dense, beech-and-pine Forêt d'Iraty on occasional nocturnal smuggling missions into Spain; or guiding oxen to St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, the market town approximately ten kilometers (six miles) away. Until Manech left the only official political division he knew was the path taken by the Rio Iraty, a short stretch of which formed the border between France and Spain.

Moving out of his familiar realm meant crossing into a foreign country, which according to a popular Basque proverb was "a land of wolves." He was no longer able to see the landmarks that served as his spatial coordinates - the stony crest of the Pic de Behorleguy towering above the surrounding peaks of the Basses-Pyrénées, the semicircular apse of the ancient Chapelle St.-Sauveur protruding from the brow of the mountainside, or the small streams veining the ravines - and could not easily judge distance. Surely he was not the first shepherd-soldier en route to the trenches in northern France to mistakenly believe he had landed in Paris upon his arrival in Bayonne (a bustling, river port city sixty kilometers from his valley).

Manech's adolescent years spent learning to survive the hardships and isolation of mountain life had hardened his mind to both physical danger and death, and fashioned him into a fierce and determined warrior. Captured during battle and taken as a prisoner to Germany, Manech escaped, intent upon rejoining his unit. His limited reading and orienteering skills, however, had set him on a northerly trajectory to (officially neutral) Holland, where an unlikely band of "wolves" - a group of schoolchildren - discovered and reported him to their teacher. He narrowly escaped capture during a manhunt organized by the Dutch schoolteacher, and once in France he immediately requested a return to the trenches. By the end of the war his physical feats of courage and sense of duty had earned him several military honors, including a croix de guerre, the highest accolade that could be conferred on a combat soldier.

Jean turned out to be a model soldier and patriot in more than one way. As a boy growing up in Mendive in the last decade of the nineteenth century he had formal schooling that probably lasted until he was only ten or twelve years of age, but during the winter months he received a continuing education through his family's veillées (nightly gatherings) to husk yellow corn. Seated with the elders around the hearth Jean listened for hours to descriptions of the pantheon of supernatural beings who tested the physical strength, religious faith, and cleverness of the human population of the Basque provinces or revealed the origins of the mysterious sites that dotted the region. Many of the stories, localized to a particular hamlet or village, told of the Laminak, the benevolent little people who lived in holes and caves, hoarded treasure, or would perform household miracles for a price. Other stories featured the giants, the Mairiak, responsible for the formation of a variety of monumental stone structures: dolmens, menhirs, cromlechs, chapels, bridges, and even chateaux. The list of their handiwork included the round stone that capped the dolmen of Chuberrasain-Harri (situated in the midst of a mountain pasture above Mendive). According to ancient legend, the boulder's placement was the result of a throwing contest between the superhuman Roland and a Basque shepherd. The shepherd won because, when it came to his turn, the object that he had thrown into the air never landed - it was not a stone, but a bird! The carnivorous and powerful Wild Ogre and Wild Ogress who inhabit the somber forests also figured prominently in numerous Basque myths. By turns comic and moralistic, the fables and folk legends repeated two central themes: the triumph of Christian belief over the forces of evil, and the heroism of a clever Basque shepherd in outsmarting a superior force.

Extended stays up in the high country tending the sheep during the summer months no doubt allowed Jean to absorb an additional collection of fantastic tales. During the occasional gatherings that broke the long periods of solitude, he would have heard the older shepherds reveal the source of the swirling mist, of the distant cries from the forest, of the terrifying landslides of boulders. As he sat huddled among them in the crude, smoke-filled stone shelters, he would have heard as well the stories of human encounters with talking animals and capricious spirits who terrorize the sanity of men living in the mountains - all told, of course, as gospel truth.

Jean Sarochar drew upon these tales of magic and miracles to maintain his own alertness in the trenches and to relieve the anxiety and boredom of others in his regiment. By narrating Basque legends for an audience of other peasant Frenchmen (unfamiliar with the terrain and the culture of his homeland), Jean discovered his gift as an entertaining raconteur. For hours on end the animated banter of the diminutive shepherd with a ferretlike mien could amuse the other poilus nearby. If his delivery failed to produce the intended response Jean likely recited the disclaimer invoked in Basque oral tradition: "There was once a crow, a very black crow. He had one wing that was much longer than the other; and if the short wing had been longer, so would this tale!"

Four years of outlasting the misery and suffering in the trenches and exemplary action on the battlefields earned Jean Sarochar new status among his French comrades-in-arms as both a hero and a storyteller. He was one of the lucky ones who emerged from the relentless artillery bombardments with a single permanent scar of a minor shrapnel wound in his leg. Unlike the men whose homecoming would be noted by an engraved marble memorial honoring "Enfants de Mendive, Morts pour la France, 1914-18," prominently placed on the church portal where all attending the daily or Sunday Mass would be reminded of their sacrifice, Jean returned with a pension and a chestful of medals. Just as important, he bore a new collection of dramatic stories in which he was the brave and resourceful protagonist who had outfoxed the powerful enemy.

But why was a decorated shepherd-soldier who was returning from the Great War met with such a disappointing reception in his own village? Perhaps it was too painful for those who had lost family members to hear the stories of Jean's exploits. Of the twenty men from Mendive killed in the war, twelve were under thirty years old and the rest between thirty and forty-two. They were not youths but rather the village's fathers and fathers-to-be, comprising more than 5 percent of the village's population. So great was France's loss - 1.5 million dead and an even greater number nonfatally gassed or seriously maimed - that during the postwar years, honoring the fallen took precedence over recognizing the still living. Only on the national holidays of Quatorze Juillet or Armistice Day, when veterans' groups assembled for the large parades in St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, could a soldier like Jean enjoy the full glory of his achievement.

Perhaps the repeated tales of a war in a faraway "land of wolves" led to waning interest by Jean's neighbors. Perhaps they considered his moments of valor and daring exploits nothing more than simple demonstrations of manhood. In the Basque border culture, where smuggling was both sport and livelihood, eluding one's captors was a basic skill learned in youth. Perhaps Jean's monologues did not sit well with listeners accustomed to a narrator as transmitter of wisdom rather than narrator as protagonist.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Surgeon and the Shepherd by Meg Ostrum Copyright © 2004 by University of Nebraska Press. Excerpted by permission.
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