Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

‘You see, we won the war. No question about it,’ Palfy said.

Next to them, an ex-serviceman curiously sporting a faithful copy of a Hitler moustache hissed at them, ‘Shut up, you bloody layabouts!’

‘Forgive me, Monsieur,’ Palfy said contritely, ‘I was only joking.’

‘This is no time for jokes.’

Jean’s elbow connected with Palfy’s ribs. One of the sergeants, good-looking in a thuggish way, was taking his three paces forward to receive a Croix de Guerre.

‘It’s Tuberge! They’re giving Tuberge the Croix de Guerre! They’re out of their minds!’

‘Not that bastard who trousered my watch!’

There was movement and a murmuring around them. The ex-serviceman put up his fists.

‘Now you’re insulting our heroes!’

‘I make a hero like that every morning,’ Palfy said.

‘Shut up!’

‘Oh, belt up, you old fart.’

The ex-serviceman attempted to grab Palfy’s shirtfront. Shoving him back, Palfy broke free and, cupping his hands around his mouth, yelled, ‘Sergeant Tuberge! You’re a fairy! Coward! Bastard! Looter! Murderer! Shit! Thug!’

The general, about to pin on Tuberge’s medal, stopped dead, although he did not deign to turn towards the heckler. Nor did the colonel, who beckoned to an aide-de-camp. In the reverential silence that reigned across the square, Palfy’s shouts had been heard by everyone. Tuberge himself, fists clenched, appeared to be about to dive into the crowd towards his tormentor, who was now brandishing his fist, having just shoved the infuriated ex-serviceman to the ground.

The ex-serviceman was shouting, ‘Arrest them! Arrest them! They’re agitators.’

The aide-de-camp ran over to a police sergeant. In the ranks of his old battalion Jean could see Ascary doubled up with laughter, Hoffberger scarlet with amusement, and Negger, who had put his rifle on the ground to underline his pacifism. Despite the many hands trying to restrain him, Palfy was not finished.

‘Bloody coward! Bloody bugger! Bloody … navvy!’ he went on shouting.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Jean begged him.

The police were running towards them. Ducking low, they shoved their way back through the crowd, which watched them dumbfounded. Breaking free, they found that they were face to face with a garde mobile ,1 who tried to grab their arms. They tripped him and he fell.

‘This way!’ Palfy said.

They ran down one side of the square. No one tried to stop them, but several policemen in the square were still following them, running parallel to the crowd, which might have thinned out enough to let them through if it had not been distracted by a new development. Overcome by heat, weakened by dysentery, three soldiers who had been standing presenting arms for ten minutes crashed to the ground. They were followed by a fourth. A bugle call and a series of drum rolls covered the yells of the police and the growing noise of the crowd. Reaching the corner, Jean and Palfy found a narrow cobbled street that led up to a church. They had left the garde mobile a hundred metres behind them. Palfy swerved right. Jean was following suit when he suddenly saw, directly in front of him, the young woman with ash-blond hair. Their eyes met. The woman’s were amused. Jean was lost for words, feeling the same inexpressible emotion he had felt when she had innocently stood in front of the café terrace with the sun shining through the light lawn of her dress.

‘What’s your name? Tell me!’ he blurted out.

She stopped, and smiled.

‘Quick!’ he said.

‘Claude.’

Not hearing his friend behind him, Palfy spun round and shouted, ‘Jean!’

‘I’m here!’

The garde mobile was gaining on them. The young woman was still smiling. Jean, wrenching himself away, caught up with Palfy and together they ran up to the church then turned left into a small square where an area had been roped off for some roadworks. Palfy stepped over them, put his shoulder to the door of a small wooden hut till it gave, and pulled out two pickaxes and a pair of straw hats.

‘Take off your shirt!’ he said.

Seconds later they were breaking up the earth with their picks as the garde mobile and a dozen policemen arrived.

‘Oy! You lads! Did you see a couple of men scarpering like rabbits?’ the sergeant asked breathlessly.

‘That way!’ Jean pointed to a side street.

The sergeant mopped his brow and turned to his men.

‘They’ll be the death of us! Right, let’s go!’

The group jogged out of sight. Palfy dropped his pickaxe and pounded his bare pectorals.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘given the combined brain power of a middle-aged police sergeant and a youngish garde mobile , I reckon it will take them a good five minutes to work out that no one works on the roads on a Sunday and that actually we are Sergeant Tuberge’s tormentors. So no need to hurry. Put your shirt on, my fine friend, and let’s get out of here and find a drink.’

‘I’ve met one of the women of my dreams,’ Jean said.

‘Your little shadow puppet in the blue lawn dress?’

‘How did you guess?’

‘I have a talent.’

‘I spoke to her.’

‘Are you going to have many children?’

‘We’re going to make love endlessly, but we’ll only have two children, and not until several years after we marry.’

‘I want to be godfather to the eldest.’

‘You shall.’

They put their rough wool shirts back on and left the roadworks behind. The streets behind Place de Jaude were deserted, the citizens of Clermont-Ferrand having gathered en masse to watch the parade. The army, decried and scorned for years, had again become a symbol, one of the values the French were trying to cling to. The first parade by Jean and Palfy’s regiment since the armistice belied the merciless thrashing Germany had inflicted on it and cast a pious veil over the missing, the million and a half prisoners who at that very moment, crammed into livestock wagons or straggling along distant roads, were being herded to camps in Silesia and Poland.

Palfy seemed to know where he was going. Jean followed him, but so absentmindedly that his friend stopped and said, ‘Hello! Where are you?’

‘A small part of me’s with the lovely Claude, the rest is with our friend Tuberge. The look on his face …’

‘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.