Richard Gordon - THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

'Miss Tiplady is very well, and now married.'

_'Eh, bien…_ we wondered if you ever got home safely to England. Those days of 1940 brought no credit to any of the Allies. Not to us French, because we ran away. Not to you British, because you snatched back all your planes. Not to the Americans, because they should have declared war on Hitler there and then. But you have heard of Jean-Baptiste? My son?' I shook my head. 'He was shot. By the Germans, as a hostage.'

I was so appalled that I could say nothing. I had noticed that the professor still wore a black crepe band across his lapel. His was a suffering of which I had often heard during the past few months, but never encountered face to face. He waved me to a chair. 'We are getting over it now. We see him as dead for the honour of France, like any other soldier killed in action.'

'But when did this happen?'

'In 1942. Of course, in 1940 my son had to report back to the Army, and was immediately locked up by the Germans. He had a hope they might release him, because of his English-to interpret the broadcasts of your BBC, something of that nature, but the Boches had enough interpreters of their own and weren't inclined to trust a Frenchman. I got him out early in 1941, on what they called _en congй de captivitй._ Jean-Baptiste had been working in my laboratory at the Franзoise-Xavier, and the Germans were releasing in a conditional way _le personnel sanitaire,_ as well as men to run the railways, the electricity and gas, and so on. My God, he was better off then than millions of others captured in the fields, or even sitting in their barracks, some of them kids just called to the colours, who'd never even had a rifle in their hands. Do you know what these were saying at the Armistice? That it obviously meant demobilization for everyone, they'd be back in their homes in a fortnight. Instead, they were marched off to Germany, without food, sleeping in fields, and kept for the rest of the war securely behind _les barbelйs.'_

He paused, leaving me to feel the pain of his silence for almost half a minute.

'Then in 1942…at the beginning of August. Things really started to become very bad in Paris that summer. The German General Schaumburg had been killed, a bomb was thrown at his car. The Nazis were getting nervous, which was a very dangerous state, as I'm sure you know. Of course, they ascribed the attack to "Jews and Communists", but it was the work of the Resistance. Jean-Baptiste was arrested by the SS. Why they should pick on him I don't know, I don't know…'

The Professor sat in his chair slowly shaking his head, still in tragic bewilderment. 'Perhaps it was because of my position in the medical faculty of Paris. There were plenty of my son's fellow-officers after the Armistice who were left completely unmolested. He was kept in the Fresnes prison, we never saw him nor heard from him. Then a German officer was shot dead in Molitor Mйtro station, near the racecourse in the Bois de Boulogne. The Polizeifьhrer, the SS General Oberg, announced that one hundred Frenchmen would be shot if the assassin was not handed over by the population to the French police in ten days. Well, the assassin was not. My son was shot with the others on the morning of August 1, by the little barracks at the Carrefour des Cascades in the Bois. He was allowed to write a letter first, which I have in that desk. As an additional punishment, General Oberg shut all Paris theatres and cinemas for a week,' he added with a contemptuous snort. 'Which shows how the Nazis equated the value of a hundred human lives.'

We sat without speaking for some moments. I could not console him, because consolation is a charity which can outrun the power of words.

'Yes, my son died in action,' Professor Piйry repeated wearily. 'Had that assassin been denounced, do you know what would have happened? All his male relatives-including his brothers-in-law and all his cousins over eighteen-would have been shot. Yes, shot, all of them. Their wives would all have been sent to concentration camps. Their children all taken to a prison-school. This Teutonic thoroughness was made completely clear to us by a proclamation from General Oberg when he took up his job. The General claimed his measures were necessary for the calm and security of the Parisiens. And they say the Nazis had no sense of humour,' he ended bitterly. 'That letter of my son's will be passed down in my family, it shall never be destroyed.'

I was relieved that a knock at the dining-room door broke the tension. The maid appeared, remembering me now and smiling. She left on the table a brass tray with two minute glasses and a bottle of reddish apйritif, which I noticed from its encrusted neck had been in use for some time.

'We are still obliged to be frugal,' Professor Piйry explained, pouring out two drinks. 'But things are naturally better than during the occupation, when we had alternate _fours avec_ and _fours sans_-of wine, you know.'

I asked something which had often been in my mind the past five years. 'What happened in Paris in the days immediately after we left for Tours?'

'Oh, the Germans showed their noses early on June 14. They came along the rue de Flandre from the porte de la Villette, in the north-east. There was nothing in their way except unarmed policemen to direct their traffic. I saw a column of them about six-thirty, driving towards Neuilly from the Invalides. Soon we had posters plastered everywhere, a kindly young fellow in field-grey without his helmet, holding up three French kids who were eating his bread-and-butter ration. _Abandonnйes, faites confiance au soldat allemand!_ Goebbels at his most expert. Goebbels graced us with a visit in July. Hitler appeared at once, of course. Things resumed an appearance of normal. The tide turned, everyone came back from the roads to see if their belongings had been stolen, a consideration hardly in their minds before departure, I assure you. I could never have left Paris, of course, because of my patients. The cinemas and cafйs reopened. So did the _maisons closes._ I remember we had Faust at the Opйra, and the _Folies Bergиre_ started again. We even had _Sainte Jeanne _by your Bernard Shaw that winter. There was a swastika flying from the Eiffel Tower and the Germans took over the Rue de Rivoli completely, from one end to the other. At noon every day they paraded up and down the Champs-Elysйes with a brass band.'

The Professor took a tiny sip of his apйritif. 'We had to settle down to some sort of life. The Germans requisitioned all our cars, we had wooden soles to our shoes, we had nothing to smoke and we went about on bicycles. Everybody kept rabbits, and they dug up the Jardin du Luxembourg to grow vegetables. There was a curfew, and any retardataires who missed the last Mйtro had to spend the night squatting in a police station.'

'Didn't you manage to get any encouragement from the outside world?'

'Listening to foreign broadcasts meant the concentration camp, but of course most of us risked it. The papers all presented the war after 1941 as a struggle between the European Forces and the Bolsheviks. That was the Pйtain line. Laval had the effrontery to make a speech here about the immense German sacrifices to this end on our own behalf. They founded _La Gerbe_-"The Sheaf"-which was supposed to be a balanced intellectual weekly, _pour les hommes de bon volontй de tous les partis._ But it was all Nazi hypocrisy, its disappearance was a minor joy of our Liberation.'

'What about de Gaulle?'

'They called him a tool of the Jews. Whom they collected in the _Vйlodrome d'Hiver-_the indoor cycle race-track-and deported to the concentration camps.'

The door opened. Madame Piйry appeared, dressed in black. She started crying as she greeted me, through association with her son. 'He was not alone,' she said. 'Now that everything has come out, the Germans shot 29,660 French hostages.'