Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

‘This is extremely serious!’ Palfy said. ‘You are aware of course that looting and hoarding are both punishable by death. Our comrade here — who I would agree is a little coarse — is responsible for executing all summary verdicts by courts martial. It seems to me he would have his hands full in this area. What sort of brandy do you have?’

‘I haven’t a very big selection.’

Palfy cast a suspicious eye over the bottles and glimpsed an unlabelled one behind the run-of-the-mill brandies.

‘Thank you, no, this gut-rot isn’t for me; I look after my health. But tell me what’s in your bottle there.’

‘A raspberry liqueur,’ Graindorge said, looking devastated.

‘What brand?’

‘There’s no brand.’

‘Interesting! Interesting! Then I suppose it must be the gift of a private distiller?’

‘How did you know?’

Palfy waved his hand disdainfully: he was hardly going to go to the trouble of explaining. Graindorge served them with a sinking heart and made to put the bottle back in the sideboard. Picallon took it from him threateningly. The surveyor, who was partial to his raspberry liqueur, tried to reason with Jean.

‘You shouldn’t let your comrade get drunk. Men like him, real forces of nature, they don’t know their limits. When a brute like him gets alcohol inside him, he’ll be unstoppable and very dangerous.’

‘We have him well under control, Monsieur. He only kills to order.’

A ray of sunshine cutting across the dining room splashed onto the tablecloth. In the golden light the curls of cigar smoke stretched out languidly, forming silvered snakes and mobile geometric shapes. Picallon was indeed drunk, but the naive and good-hearted seminarian was more ready to burst into tears than fly into a rage at the role he was being forced to play, of a poor country lad among the ways of gentlemen. Their host, he saw, was a proper bastard, and there is always something sad about the first bastard you ever come across, about discovering the multiple ruses by which Satan attaches himself to a human being. One day when the war was over and the seminary reopened, he would unburden himself of all these thoughts to his spiritual director, the abbé Fumerolle …

The reader is already aware of the author’s warm feelings for Picallon, who reminds him of the parish priest at Grangeville, Monsieur Le Couec. Between the country boy from the Jura and the elderly Breton there exists a certain bloodline: a now vanished race of French priests whose only reasoning was their brazen faith and who lived among their parishioners in poverty, charity and hope. They taught children their catechism in simple, idealised pictures that seemed fascinatingly magical. And yes, in their sermons Jesus was always a great magician, whose feats would never cease to dazzle the world. At the time this story begins, the integrity possessed by young men such as Picallon is already under threat, but so far our seminarian has been immune to the new order. His model is the village priest who awoke his own vocation, just as for Jean, already half disillusioned in faith, the model priest will always be the abbé Le Couec, that rough Breton ‘exiled’ to Normandy. Picallon of course is fated one day to confront the influences of his community, but we shall not see him in those circumstances. Meanwhile he is here, in this bourgeois dining room in a French village with a full stomach and a dry mouth, and it is too late to stop the game his comrades are intent on playing. The afternoon wears on, the bottle of raspberry liqueur is emptying, and now and then Picallon rocks back on his chair and lifts the white tulle curtain to keep an eye on the still-deserted square and the two tankettes parked on the avenue with the surveyor’s cat asleep on the bonnet of one of them. Palfy is on his third cigar, Jean has excused himself twice, and the dreadful noise of a toilet chain that refuses to flush properly has been heard. Picallon would like to go too, but is unsure of his ability to remain upright, and in a foggy dreamlike state he recalls the wedding feasts in his village at which the laziest would slip an empty bottle under the table and use that. He has hiccups, pins and needles in one leg and above all he is sick of listening to the nasal tones of Jacques Graindorge, surveyor, toady and coward, watching his every move with a terrified expression. When Picallon finally gets to his feet, the dining room sways and without Jean’s steadying hand he would have fallen over. Moving gingerly, he reaches the front door and there, in the middle of the square, opens his flies and sprinkles the cobbles as he gazes gloomily at the flag drooping from its flagpole.

‘What do you think of it?’ he asks Jean, who is still holding his arm.

‘Of what? What you’re doing?’

‘No. The flag.’

‘It looks a bit limp.’

‘And what about liberty, equality and fraternity?’

‘I’m afraid the moment for them is past.’

‘Why are you holding my arm?’

‘So you don’t fall down.’

‘Am I drunk?’

‘Not half.’

‘It’s the first time in my life and it’ll be the last, but I want it to be a drunkenness I’ll never forget, one befitting the Apocalypse. We’ll empty that stinker’s cellar, and anything we can’t drink we’ll smash up.’

‘All right, old chap …’

‘We’ll smash it up, we’ll smash it up!’

Picallon, his bladder much lighter but suddenly distracted by his obsession with smashing up what could not be drunk, forgot to put his organ away and, supported by Jean, remained standing unsteadily there, limply facing the erect flagpole on the mairie ’s pediment.

It was in this posture that he was first observed by Unterscharführer Walter Schoengel as he arrived at the village square in an armoured car, his body emerging from the green turret, ramrod straight in his black SS uniform, his face darkened by the sun beneath his peaked cap. Jean, for a second, imagined that in this victorious warrior he was seeing his friend Ernst, his companion from his famous cycling tour of Italy which had taken them to Rome in 1936, but — as we already know — Ernst and Jean will never meet again, and no chance meeting in the long war now under way will revive the friendship born four years earlier between a young Frenchman indifferent to politics and a handsome member of the Hitler Youth with straw-coloured hair.

Unfortunately this particular warrior was not Ernst, but a run-of-the-mill SS NCO with no sense of humour whatsoever, who was greatly offended by the sight of these two men in khaki shirts and trousers, staggering and with flies undone. Leaping athletically from his armoured car, revolver in hand, he walked up to them, barking a sharp order. Jean understood and put his hands up. Picallon remained bewildered. The Unterscharführer barked again. Jean translated.

‘Put your hands up, you idiot, otherwise he’ll shoot us.’

Picallon did as he was told, forgetting his open flies and limp penis, which was enjoying its exposure to the fresh air with an utter lack of curiosity for the events unfolding around it. The puddle on the cobbles bore witness to what had occurred only moments before. Walter Schoengel circled it with disgust and patted both men down. Reassured as to their inoffensive character and that they were a couple of strays, he sniggered and delivered a good kick to both their backsides. The driver of the armoured car had raised his goggles and was observing the scene with ill-concealed ribaldry as the square suddenly began to fill with motorcycles and sidecars, a further two light armoured cars and an open-topped car on whose rear seat sat Obersturmführer Karl Schmidt, his face hidden in the shadow cast by a gleaming helmet adorned with the SS lightning flashes. Schmidt was a lieutenant with a plump face and small, piercing grey eyes, and to begin with he paid no attention to what was happening. With a gesture he motioned to a young Obergrenadier to lower the French flag, then ordered a house-to-house search. Jacques Graindorge’s door was still open. Two grenadiers jogged into the hall and returned with the surveyor and Palfy, who were propelled forward by the rifle butts in their back and then lined up with Jean and Picallon. The Obersturmführer knew a few words of French.