Promise at Dawn Page 21

  I was inducted at Salon-de-Provence on November 4, 1938, and took my place in the special train by which the conscripts were to travel. A crowd of friends and relatives had accompanied the young men to the station, but only my mother had furnished herself with a tricolor flag, which she never ceased waving, at the same time shouting “Vive la France!”—a display that caused many hostile or mocking glances and caustic remarks. The class which was being called up was remarkable for its lack of enthusiasm and for a profound conviction-which the events of ‘40 were to justify to the full—that they were being compelled to take part in a jeu de con—“mug’s game” would be the closest translation, I suppose. I remember one reluctant young recruit, enraged by my mother’s patriotic and jingoistic carryings-on, so contrary to the sound antimilitarist traditions of the times, muttering:

  “You can see that she’s not French!”

  Since I, myself, was infuriated and driven nearly frantic by the uncontrolled exuberance of the old lady with the tricolor flag, I was only too glad of the excuse to give vent to my feelings and plunged head forward, aiming at my neighbor’s nose. The brawl at once became general. Cries of “Fascist,” “traitor” and “down with the Army” broke out all over the train just as it was jerking into motion, while the tricolor flag still desperately fluttered on the platform. I had just time to fight my way to the window and wave my hand in farewell before plunging back into the providential free-for-all, which enabled me to escape from the emotional upset of the parting.

  With my certificate of Préparation militaire supérieure and my law degree, the door of the officers’ flying school was open to me and I should at once have received my marching orders to Avord. Instead I was kept for very nearly six weeks at Salon-de-Provence. In reply to all my inquiries, the officers and noncoms merely shrugged. They had received no instructions about me. I made representation after representation through the proper official channels, to no avail. At long last, a particularly decent officer, a certain Lieutenant Barbier, took an interest in my case and backed my protests. I was told to report at Avord, where I turned up one full month late, having missed almost a third of the whole course of studies. I did not allow myself to be discouraged. I was there at last; and that was all that mattered. I set to work with a determination of which I did not know myself capable, and, in spite of certain difficulties with the theory of the compass, managed to make up for lost time. My marks were average, except in flying and infantry leadership, in which I suddenly found that I had all my mother’s authority of word and gesture. I was happy. I loved the airplanes of that long vanished day, with their open cockpits, their primitive instruments, which left such a margin to individual flair and initiative, and the devil-may-care attitude of the pilots who flew them in a sky still free from regulations, channels of approach and radio guidance. I enjoyed the long hours which we spent on the airfield in our heavy one-piece leather suits—and a hellish business it was to get into them—floundering in the mud, encased in leather, helmeted, gloved and with goggles on our noses, climbing into the cockpit of the good old Potez-25, which ambled along at about the speed of a draft horse, in a glorious reek of oil, of which my nostrils still retain a nostalgic memory. Imagine the cadet officer hanging half out of the open cockpit of a bomber flying at about 70 m.p.h., or standing upright in the nose, giving hand signals to the pilot of a Leo-20 biplane with its long black, waving wings only a year before the Messerschmitt-110 and eighteen months before the Battle of Britain, and it is easy to see that we were being actively trained, like the French Army, for the war of 1914, with the disastrous consequences now known to all of us.

  Time passed quickly, and the day of the graduation parade was drawing near, when we were to be told our graduating rank, and allowed to choose the units to which we were to be posted.

  The military tailor had already made the round of the barrack rooms, and our uniforms were ready. My mother had sent me, to pay for my outfit, the sum of five hundred francs, which she had borrowed from M. Pantaleoni, our old friend of the Buffa Market. My great problem was the cap. Caps could be ordered with two varieties of visor—short or long. I couldn’t make up my mind. The long visor gave me a more rakish look, which was much to be desired, but the short one suited me better. I managed, after a thousand fruitless attempts, to produce a small mustache of the kind then considered very smart by fliers. With a pair of gold wings on my chest, I won’t go so far as to say that I cut a stunning figure; still, I looked pretty tough, and thus hidden, the little boy could hope to pass unnoticed.

  The graduation parade took place in an atmosphere of happy anticipation. The names of the available stations were written on a blackboard—Paris, Marrakech, Meknès, Maison-Blanche, Biskra. . . . Each cadet could make his choice according to his marks. Those with the highest traditionally settled for Morocco.

  I earnestly hoped to get a posting in the south of France, so as to be able to visit Nice frequently, and show myself, with my mother on my arm, at the Buffa Market or on the Promenade des Anglais. The Faïence airfield seemed best suited for this purpose, and, as my fellow trainees stood up and declared their preferences, I kept an anxious eye on the blackboard.

  I had a good chance of getting a respectable rank, and listened with confidence while the captain read out the names.

  Ten names, fifty names, seventy-five names . . . it certainly looked as though Faïence was going to slip through my fingers.

  There were two hundred and ninety of us, all told.

  Faïence was snapped up by No. 80. I waited. A hundred and twenty names, a hundred and fifty, two hundred . . . Still nothing. The gloomy, muddy airfields of the north were approaching with frightening speed. It wasn’t brilliant, to be sure; still, I did not have to tell my mother what my graduation rank had been.

  Two hundred and fifty, two hundred and sixty . . .

  An appalling hunch suddenly turned my heart to ice. I can still feel the cold sweat breaking out on my forehead. . . . No, it’s not a memory: I have just wiped it away with my hand, although more than twenty yean have passed since. Pavlov reflex, I suppose. I cannot think, even today, of that abominable moment without feeling that drop of sweat on my forehead.

  Out of close on three hundred trainees, I was the only one not to receive commissioned rank.

  I was not even made a sergeant, not even a corporal. Contrary to all established custom, and to regulations, I just managed to scrape through as a lance corporal!

  For the next few hours I struggled in a sort of nightmare, a hideous fog. I kept a stiff upper lip on parade, surrounded by my silent and appalled companions. All my available strength went into keeping up appearances, trying to look unconcerned, detached, a man who could take it on the chin, trying not to cry, not to break down in sobs. I believe I even smiled.

  Generally such a rap over the knuckles was given only for disciplinary reasons. Two pilot trainees had been held back on that account. But it didn’t apply in my case. I had never had so much as a reprimand. True, I had missed the opening stages of my training, but from no fault of my own; besides, my chef de brigade, Lieutenant Jacquard, a professional soldier from Saint-Cyr Academy, a man with a chilly manner, but as honest and straight as they make them, had told me, and later confirmed his opinion in writing, that my marks would have fully justified a commission. What had happened? Why had I been kept swinging my heels for six weeks at Salon-de-Provence, in defiance of all rules?

  My comrades, silent or indignant, crowded around to shake my hand. I smiled: I remained true to the character I had chosen to play, and I kept the little boy well in hand, preventing him from screaming. But I thought I was going to die. And all the time I could see my mother’s face, as she stood on the platform at Nice waving her tricolor flag.

  At three o’clock that afternoon, while I was lying on my cot, staring at the ceiling, a Corporal Piaille—Piaye?—Paille?—came to look for me. He was not one of the flying personnel, but a pen pusher in the station headquarters. He came to a halt i
n front of my cot, with his hands in his pockets. He was wearing a leather jacket. He’s no right to that, I thought: only flying personnel are entitled to wear leather jackets.

  “Do you want to know why they flunked you?”

  I looked at him.

  “Because you are not French-born. You are Russian-born and your naturalization is too recent. Three years, they feel, is not enough to make a fine Frenchman. There is even a rule that you can’t be a flying officer in the Air Force unless your parents were French, or you yourself have been naturalized for more than ten years. But the rule is never applied. There was a row in Parliament about it; they called it undemocratic, discriminating, racist. But they’re back at it again.”

  I don’t remember what I said to him. I think it was—“I am French,” or something like that, because he suddenly said in a pitying sort of way: “You’re just a stupid ass, that’s what you are.”

  But he didn’t go away. He seemed to be all worked up and resentful. Perhaps he was one of my sort—wouldn’t stand for injustice of any kind.

  “Thanks all the same,” I said.

  “They’ve been making inquiries about you; that’s why they kept you hanging about at Salon for six weeks. There was a lot of argument about whether they’d let you into the Air Force, or turn you into a foot slogger. The Air Ministry said, yes, they’d take you, but this lot here, they said no, in their own dirty way, that is, by flunking you. They just gave you a lousy good-looks mark; that did it!”

  The “good-looks,” as we called it, or “general aptitude mark,” the official name for it, was given to you by your instructors, a sort of all-round comment on your personality and your fitness to become an officer. You could be the number-one cadet at the Air Force Academy, as far as your studies were concerned, and still fail, if the good-looks mark went against you. In the hands of reactionary and politically minded officers, it served to eliminate Jews, left-wingers and various other métèques—the closest translation would be “naturalized trash.” It was an unfailing weapon, later brought to perfection by the Vichy régime.

  “You can’t even holler: everything has been played according to the rules. That’s what the rules are for.”

  I just lay on my back. He stayed looking at me for a moment or two. He was the sort of chap who couldn’t put his sympathy into words.

  “Don’t let it get you down,” he said. Then he added: “On les aura! (We’ll get ‘em!) ”

  It was the first time I had ever heard that expression used by a French soldier about the French Army. I had always thought it was reserved strictly for the Germans. I felt neither hate nor resentment, only an overpowering desire to vomit. I tried to think of the Mediterranean and its pretty girls; I shut my eyes and took refuge in their arms, where nothing could touch me, where nothing would be refused. The barrack room was deserted, but I had company. The monkey gods of my childhood, from whom my mother had fought all her life to rescue me, whom she was so sure we had left forever behind us in Poland and Russia, had suddenly raised their ugly heads in this land of France, which I had always thought was forbidden ground to them, and it was their stupid laughter I was hearing now in the homeland of reason. In the dirty trick which had been played on me I had no difficulty in seeing the hand of Totoche, the god of Stupidity, who was very soon going to make Hitler the master of Europe and open the gates of France to German armor, after having first convinced the French General Staff that the theories of a certain Colonel de Gaulle were just a lot of moonshine. But it was Filoche, the petit-bourgeois monkey god of Mediocrity, of rabid scorn and prejudice, whose ugly head I recognized above all, and what broke my heart was that he had put on for this occasion the uniform and braided cap of our Air Force. For, as always, I couldn’t bring myself to see enemies in my fellow men. In a vague and inexplicable sort of way, I felt myself the ally and defender even of those who had just stabbed me in the back. I understood well the social, political and historical conditions which lay at the root of my humiliation but, determined though I was to fight against all those poisons, it was to a nobler victory that I kept my eyes turned. Whether there lurks deep down in me some primitive and pagan element I do not know, but at the slightest provocation, I clench my fists and face outward; I do all I can honorably to keep my place in the ranks of our age-old rebellion; I see History as a relay race in which each one of us, before dropping in his tracks, must carry one stage further the challenge of being a man; I refuse to find anything final in our biological, intellectual or physical limitations; my hope knows no frontiers; so confident am I of the outcome of the struggle that the blood of our species sometimes begins to sing in me, and the rumble of my brother the ocean seems then to come from my veins and I experience a gaiety, an intoxication of hope, a certainty of victory so intense that, on our age-old battlefield covered with rusty shields and broken swords, I still feel as if I were standing on the eve of our first fight. That comes, no doubt, from a sort of madness, of simple-mindedness, elementary, primitive but irresistible, which I must have inherited from my mother. I am fully aware of its absurdity, my confidence drives me frantic, but there is nothing I can do about it and it makes my task very difficult, when all it would take is to know how to despair. A spark of confidence, of atavistic gaiety, keeps glowing in me and it only needs a darkening of the shadows around me to blow it into a triumphant flame. Human stupidity may make the angels weep, the uniform of a French officer may serve as a nesting place for mediocrity and rabid prejudice, men’s hands—whether French, German, Russian or American—may suddenly show their incredible dirt—it always seems to me that injustice comes from elsewhere and that men are never more clearly its victims than when they are its instruments. At the toughest moment of a fight, whether political or military, I find myself dreaming of some way in which the two sides can come together and join ranks. My egocentrism makes me peculiarly unsuited to fratricidal wars and I cannot see how anything, torn from the hands of those who share my essential destiny, can be called a victory. Nor can I become an entirely political animal, for I always keep recognizing myself in my enemies. It is a real infirmity.

  I lay there on my back, tense and eager and smiling in my youthfulness, and I remember that my body was suddenly lifted by an impetuous and imperious physical craving, and that for more than an hour I battled against the savage and primitive call of my blood.

  As to the fine captains and their stab in the back, I saw them five years later when they were still captains but certainly less fine. Not the tiniest scrap of ribbon bloomed upon their breasts and it was with a very curious expression on their faces that they looked at that other captain who received them in his office. By that time I was a Companion of the Liberation, Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, Croix de Guerre. I made no attempt to conceal my medals and I am willing to confess that, whenever blood rushes to my face, it is more from anger than from modesty. I chatted with them for a few minutes about our shared memories of Avord—memories that were wholly inoffensive. I felt no animosity toward them. They had long been dead and buried.

  Another and somewhat unexpected consequence of the blow I received was that, from then on, I felt myself to be truly a Frenchman. It was as though, by this painful bang on the head of the magic wand, I had become truly assimilated.

  It had dawned on me, at last, that the French were not a race apart, that they were not superior beings, that they too could be stupid, ridiculous and as unjust as anyone else—in short, that we were all brothers. I realized that France was compounded of a thousand different faces, beautiful and ugly, noble and hideous, inspiring and repulsive, and that it was for me to choose from among them the one which seemed most to resemble what my mother had told me. I forced myself, without quite succeeding, to become a political animal. I took sides, chose my allegiances, my loyalties, refused to let myself be blinded by a flag, but looked carefully at the faces of those who held it.

  There remained my mother. I couldn’t make up my mind to tell her the truth. It was all very well
my arguing to myself that she was used to being kicked in the teeth: the fact remained that I had to find some way of softening the blow. We were granted a week’s leave before reporting to our respective units and I climbed into the train still undecided. On arriving at Marseilles, I felt tempted to jump onto the platform, to desert, to work my passage on a cargo boat, to enlist in the Foreign Legion and so disappear forever. The thought of that worn and wrinkled face lifted to mine, of the look of consternation, of animal incomprehension in those great eyes, was more than I could bear. A sudden spasm of nausea overcame me and I got to the lavatory only just in time. All the way from Marseilles to Cannes I was as sick as a dog. But ten minutes before drawing into Nice, I was suddenly visited by a noble inspiration. The only thing that really mattered was to save the picture of France as the land where all the beauty lies and where justice dwells, which my mother had all her life carried in her head. This I was determined to do. France must be kept out of this—she could not have borne so terrible a disappointment. Knowing her as I did, I thought up a very simple, a very elegant and plausible lie, worthy of a true man of the world, which would not only console her but confirm the high idea she had of me.