Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

Palfy was in raptures at the thought of the magnificent bill left behind at the hotel. At every stop he took the account out of his wallet and grieved at not having ordered caviar and champagne every night.

‘One day I shall regret it bitterly. But the truth compels me to say that at this moment I am sick of champagne, caviar, lobster à l’américaine, and foie gras. One must take care of oneself. The MO was right, apart from the fact that he needs new glasses: it’s not my chest that’s hollow, it’s my stomach that’s ballooning.’

Three days later, after numerous stops at restaurants and country hotels, the all-consuming Austro-Daimler pulled up outside high gates at the entrance to a field at Yssingeaux in the upper Loire. On a washed-out banner they read: ‘Military Training Centre. No entry.’ A huge sergeant was on guard duty, his helmet and boots greased, his thumbs tucked into his belt.

‘Move along!’ he shouted mechanically.

It took him some time to realise that the two men alighting from the monstrous dimensions of the vehicle in front of him were recruits. And recruits liable to a week’s confinement to barracks for arriving two hours late.

‘What — what about your car?’ he asked, shocked that they should abandon their fabulous conveyance so blithely, in the middle of nowhere.

‘My chauffeur, who is following behind on his bicycle, should be here in a moment. He will drive it to the garage. And if by some chance he should fail to appear, it’s yours. An extraordinary vehicle, whose like we shall not see again. It was built especially for a Russian grand duke.’

The sergeant judged that this strange recruit was in urgent need of basic discipline and the full rigour of the regulations that constitute the strength of all armies. He sentenced both men to a week’s confinement. Across open fields — they would be given a key when they had earned the colonel’s trust, as the orderly subtly put it — they were led to a barn where several men, all completely drunk, were snoring in the straw. Palfy changed into his silk pyjamas, quite unbothered by the strong smell of rats.

‘You see,’ he said to Jean, who was still angry at their reception, ‘we are about to learn the hard way. They are going to temper us in the steel from which victories are forged. Vive la France!’

Their neighbour, a hirsute ginger-haired man bristling with stalks of straw, sat up.

‘ Vive la France ? Shut your gob. Demob is all we give a shit about!’

And lay down again. For the record, let us note that this rebel’s name was Boucharon, that, slowed down by his flat feet which prevented him from running, he was, in June 1940, taken prisoner by the enemy and sent to Silesia, where he had to wait another five years to be demobilised. Poor Boucharon, a victim of society, the state and himself. There were hundreds, thousands of Boucharons whose fates were sealed that night of 31 August. The following day, emerging from the aftereffects of their overindulgence in red wine, these warriors took a moderate interest in the news of the day: the Germans were invading Poland. A captain explained to them that the Polish cavalry were accomplishing marvels and that the Nazis’ armoured divisions were staring death in the face. With their lances the Poles were aiming at the firing slits and putting out the eyes of the German tank crews.

The whole troop having been confined to barracks, Palfy and Jean hardly minded their week’s punishment. As the depot lacked new kit, the men were issued with blue-grey uniforms from the last war. An orderly appeared with clippers. In an excess of enthusiasm that had more than a whiff of insolence to it — the high command did not require such zeal — the friends had their heads shaved. They had to ask for new forage caps which did not slip down to their ears. Throughout the first week the Austro-Daimler remained parked outside the gate where they had left it. The colonel summoned Palfy.

‘Private Palfy,’ he said nervously, ‘I have decided to speak to you myself. You have arrived at this training depot in a car that demands financial resources well beyond the means of a private soldier, second-class. At such a moment as this, that represents something of a scandal. It must cease. Remove that Austro-Daimler, which offends the patriotic gaze of all of us, and let us see it no more. On another matter, having received a report from the officer in charge of mail, I must warn you that you do not have the right to receive letters addressed to you as “Private Baron Palfy, second class, Yssingeaux”. The use of titles, be they real or false, is forbidden in military correspondence below the rank of lieutenant. I could have had the duty sergeant inform you of these matters. I preferred to take them up with you myself. I trust that you understand the seriousness of my warning. You may go …’

Palfy sensed that the colonel had been on the point of saying ‘my dear baron’, but had stopped himself in time. He saluted, replaced his cap and, after a sparkling about-turn, went out. The Austro-Daimler was sold, piece by piece, to Yssingeaux’s three garages. A scrap merchant bought the chassis. Crushed, it would be used to make artillery shells, an excellent way to return the steel to its country of origin. With the rest of the army watching France’s borders, the training of new recruits and reservists continued in the serenity and calm of an imperturbable, determined Auvergne. A warrant officer taught two hundred fighters the unbeatable way to win a battle: as soon as tanks were sighted on the horizon, all they had to do was dig a hole fifty centimetres wide and one and a half metres deep. When the tank reached the infantryman, he crouched down, waited for it to pass over him, then straightened up and shot the tank from behind. This clever tactic was known as the ‘Gamelin hole’ after the general who, from his operational headquarters at Vincennes, was commanding the Allies. Simple, but someone had to come up with it.

Palfy, with his good humour and sarcastic comments, helped Jean put up with this idiotic life. Their evenings were spent writing enthusiastic letters, hoping that they would be read by the censors. Madeleine was the first to reply to Palfy. Jean received half a page from Albert.

I have no right to judge you. Freedom is one and indivisible. My faith remains intact and I shall stick by it. I swore to myself that you would never be a soldier. My disappointment is very great. I expect it will finish me off. I’m an old man. Don’t ever turn up at my house in uniform, I shall shut the door in your face.

Albert

In mid-September Jean was summoned to the guardhouse. A lady was asking for him. It was Antoinette, in a grey dress and little provincial hat, her features drawn from two nights spent on trains. She started when she saw him with his head shaved, then smiled when he told her he had done it as an act of defiance. A good-natured lieutenant granted him a pass till midnight. Jean accompanied Antoinette to the Hôtel d’Auvergne, where she had booked a room. They had dinner in the low-ceilinged restaurant, not far from where the colonel was eating and watching them out of the corner of his eye, mildly disconcerted at this intake that contained barons and privates, second-class, their heads shaved like billiard balls, who held hands with elegant young women clearly of good family. Jean did not hide his pleasure at seeing Antoinette again. She was a link to a time in his life that it felt good to cling to, to remember what happiness had been. He did not look at her as he once had. Faded already, she was no longer the heady flower of their trysts beneath the cliff and in the barn, the sad lover of his last night at Dieppe before his departure for England. He found her gauche in comparison to Geneviève, and even to those worldly English wives who had slipped into his room at night during his weekends in the country. She lacked Chantal’s freshness. But she was Antoinette, his friend from the beginning, the first girl who had known how to make him happy and make him suffer. She had also braved two nights on a train to see him and bring him socks she had knitted herself, chocolate, books, and money. All pretexts that failed to hide the feelings that she no longer dared show him directly. She also brought him something even better than these presents: news from Grangeville. Chantal had returned to Malemort and taken over the farm from her father, who had been mobilised. Her mother refused to speak to her. In the evenings she rode to Grangeville on her bicycle to meet Antoinette. They spoke a great deal about Jean. Gontran Longuet, a corporal in the Train des Équipages, had turned up for two days’ leave dressed in a comicopera uniform and brandishing a stick. Chantal had refused to meet him. Michel had been enlisted in a signals company in which, along with other pigeon fanciers, he helped train carrier pigeons that, whenever the handle on the field telephone broke, connected the headquarters at Vincennes to General George’s forward command post fifty kilometres away. Marie-Thérèse du Courseau, settled into a hotel at Compiègne very close to her son’s unit, had the great joy, thanks to the influence of her brother, deputy and member of the commission on the uses of tobacco in the Assembly, of dining with her son every evening. There was not a soldier in the French army more mollycoddled than he was. Joseph Outen, an officer cadet in a fortress regiment, was standing guard somewhere on the Maginot line, where he filled his spare time with the study of Zen Buddhism. The abbé Le Couec had got himself into serious trouble. Three days after war had been declared, a pious bigot had reported to the gendarmes that in knocking at the door of his rectory she had heard the abbé speaking German to two men who had hidden themselves in a bedroom before the abbé answered her knock. Monsieur Le Couec had been questioned for forty-eight hours by the military police before being released. He insisted that he did not know more than three words of German and had been speaking Breton to his friends. Now, every morning, he had to register at the gendarmerie. (Jean did not interrupt Antoinette, but the memory of Yann and Monsieur Carnac came back to him. What had become of those two strange figures?? Let us not spoil the suspense by revealing too soon how they will surface once again.) Albert, likewise, had been arrested in Dieppe for insulting a deputy in the street. The deputy in question had voted for war in the Assembly. Having learnt that his attacker was a disabled veteran, highly decorated and mentioned five times in dispatches, the politician decided not to press charges. But Albert was under surveillance by the gendarmes and forbidden to leave Grangeville.