Promise at Dawn Page 24
I immediately decided to follow de Gaulle to England with three of my friends, in a Den-55, an entirely new type of aircraft which none of us had ever piloted before.
The airfield at Bordeaux-Mérignac, on the 15th, 16th and 17th of June, 1940, was certainly one of the strangest places the world has ever seen. From every corner of the sky innumerable aircraft of every size and shape were coming in to land in a continual stream, piling up on the ground. Bizarre machines of which I knew neither the type nor the purpose, some of them dating from the First World War and others barely emerged from blueprint, were disgorging onto the grass passengers who were even more bizarre, many of whom seemed simply to have availed themselves of the first means of transport that had come their way.
The landing ground was thus becoming a sort of retrospective of all the prototypes which the Army of the Air had evolved in the course of the last twenty years: before dying, the French Air Force was remembering its past. The machines were less strange than their crews. I saw a young pilot of the Fleet Air Arm, with one of the most impressive displays of medals you could ever hope to see on a warrior’s chest, step down from the cockpit of his fighter plane with a little girl asleep in his arms whom he must have held on his knees during the flight. I saw another pilot disembark from his Goéland plane with what could only have been a party of agreeable inmates of a third rate provincial brothel. I saw, in a Simoun aircraft, a white haired sergeant and a woman in slacks with two dogs, a cat, a canary, a parrot, two rolled carpets and a picture by Hubert Robert propped against the side of the cockpit. I saw a decent looking bourgeois, his wife and two young girls, all carrying suitcases, inquiring from a pilot of a 540 Potez how much he would ask to take them to Spain, and the paterfamilias was wearing the ribbon of the Legion of Honor. I saw, and shall never forget, the faces of my comrades, pilots of the Dewoitines-520 and the Moranes-406 fighter planes, just back from their last combats with their wings riddled with bullets, and their young commander tearing off his Croix de Guerre and stamping it into the ground. I saw a good thirty or so generals standing around the control tower, waiting for nothing and looking like nothing. I saw inexperienced pilots, my pupils at the Air Force Academy, grabbing without orders the Bloch-151 fighter planes and taking off without ammunition, with no other hope but that of crash diving their machines into the enemy bombers, which constant alerts led us to believe were on the way, though they never came. And always the weird, the incredible aerial fauna fleeing the shipwreck of the sky, among which the sinister shapes of the Bloch-210, the famous “flying coffins,” looked like some particularly symbolic birds of ill-omen.
But I think it is our dear old Potez-25 aircraft that I shall remember best and most lovingly, together with their elderly pilots, whom we never saw without humming a popular song of the time “Grand-père, grand-père, vous oubliez votre cheval.” These old men of forty and fifty, some of them veterans of the First World War, had, in spite of the pilots’ insignia which they so proudly sported, been employed in this other and so different war only in the lowly non-flying tasks: orderly-room clerks, scribes and the like. For months now, reassuring promises had been made to them: a little more patience and they would be trained and restored to the dignity of flying crews, for liaison duties. Those promises had never been kept; and now they were taking matters into their own hands. Grabbing such Potez-25’s as were available, they were catching up, embarking on a course of self-training, and were calmly piling up flying hours, indifferent to the signs of doom all around them, calmly circling above the airfield like passengers taking swimming lessons in the midst of a shipwreck. There were a good twenty or so of these hearty men in their late forties, all convinced that they were going to be ready in time “for the first real battles,” as they put it, with a magnificent show of contempt for everything that had happened or would happen before their own splendid appearance in the sky. So intent were they on their self-appointed task that, in the middle of this fantastic aerial Dunkirk, in this atmosphere of the end of the world, hovering above the heads of defeated generals, mingling with the most hybrid and grotesque fauna that had ever filled the sky, above the scheming, conspiring, desperate, treacherous heads and weak, rotten hearts, the Potez-25’s of those old-timers continued with their purposeful roaring, touching down and taking off again, while, from the open cockpits, the grinning and determined faces of those ancestors, pig-headed enough to ignore despair, responded to the loving greetings which we waved to them. They were the France of good wine and sunlit anger which thrusts irresistibly upward from her deep roots, grows and blooms against all odds. They were schoolmasters, workmen, butchers, insurance clerks, grocers, bums, and there even was a priest among them. But they all had one thing in common, where it should be in a man.
On the day France fell, I was sitting with my back against the wall of a hangar, watching the warming-up of the Den-55 which was to take us to England. I was thinking of the silk pajamas I had had to leave behind in my room in Bordeaux, a terrible loss when you think that I had to add to it the loss of France and of my mother whom, in all probability, I should never see again. Three of my buddies, sergeants like myself, were with me. There was a look of cold fury in our eyes and loaded revolvers were tucked under our belts. We were a long way from the front but we were young and frustrated in our manhood, and the revolvers, naked, black and menacing, were merely symbols, a visual means of expressing our feelings. They helped us to attune ourselves to the mood of tragedy, and also served as camouflage for our sense of impotence, confusion and uselessness. None of us had done any fighting and de Caches ironically put into words our pathetic efforts to give ourselves airs, to take refuge in an attitude and to make it plain that we would have nothing to do with defeat: “It’s rather as though Corneille and Racine had been forbidden to write, in order to say later that France had no tragic poets.”
In spite of my determination to think only of the loss of my silk pajamas, my mother’s face kept appearing to me among all the other lights of that cloudless June. It was in vain that I then clenched my teeth, stuck out my chin, clasped my revolver; tears straightway filled my eyes and I was careful to stare hard at the sun so as to put my companions off the scent. My good friend, Belle-Gueule, who squatted next to me, also had a moral problem which he confided to us. He was a ponce in civil life and, of all his women, the one whom he preferred worked in a Bordeaux brothel. He felt, he told us, that it wasn’t “regular” to clear off and leave her behind. I tried to bolster up his morale by explaining that loyalty to one’s country must take precedence over every other consideration, even of the noblest nature, adding that I, too, was leaving behind me all that I most valued. I quoted the example of our third companion, Jean-Pierre, who hadn’t hesitated to abandon his wife and three children in order to go to England and carry on the fight. Belle-Gueule’s reply was admirable and had the effect of putting us all in our place: “That’s all very well for you,” he said. “You’re not in my line of business, so you just aren’t bound by our moral code.”
De Gaches was to pilot the plane. He had three hundred hours of flying time behind him: a fortune. With his little mustache, his uniform made for him by Lanvin and his general air of breeding, he was the very type of the young man of good family, and his presence helped us a great deal, for it seemed to give our decision to desert to England the blessing of the fine, sound French Catholic bourgeoisie.
Apart from our determination to refuse defeat, the three of us had very little in common. But we derived from everything that separated us a feeling of exaltation and an increased confidence in the single bond which united us. Had there been a murderer among us, we would have seen in his presence a further proof of the sacred, exemplary character of our mission, which made everything else futile and irrelevant, so that our differences only underlined our fundamental fraternity.
De Gaches climbed into the Den to get a few last-minute instructions from the mechanic about the handling of an aircraft none of us had ever flown before.
We were to make one trial run around the airfield, then land in order to let the mechanic out, and then take to the air again, setting a course for England. De Gaches took the controls and Belle-Gueule and Jean-Pierre were the first to join him. I was having some difficulty with the belt of my parachute. I managed to fix it and already had one foot on the ladder when I saw an airman on a bicycle pedaling at full speed in my direction, waving. I waited.
“Sergeant, you’re wanted at the control tower. A telephone message for you, urgent.”
I was petrified. The fact that, in the middle of the shipwreck, when the roads, telegraph lines and all means of communication were in a state of complete chaos, when commanding officers had lost contact with their troops and all trace of organization had disappeared under the onslaught of German tanks and the Luftwaffe, my mother’s voice had managed to reach me seemed almost natural.
For I had not the slightest doubt that it was my mother calling. At the time of the Sedan breakthrough, and later still, when the German motorcyclists were already touring the châteaux of the Loire, I had tried to get a reassuring message through to her, begging her to remember Joffre, Pétain, Foch and all those other consecrated names which she had so often quoted to me in times of stress, when our financial situation was filling me with anxiety, or when she was suffering an acute insulin reaction. But, at that time, there had still been some semblance of order in the telephone network, regulations were being strictly observed and a private conversation even of such capital importance had been out of the question.
I shouted to de Gaches to go ahead with the trial round without me and then to pick me up at the hangar, after which I borrowed the corporal’s bicycle and pedaled off.
I was only a few yards from the control tower when the Den started off down the runway. I dismounted and, before going into the building, took a casual look at the plane. The Den was already about sixty feet from the ground. It seemed to hang motionless in the air, then it rose high on its tail, swung left on one wing, dived into the earth and exploded immediately. I stared for one brief second at the column of black smoke which I was to see so often hanging over so many fallen friends. I was experiencing the first sudden blast of that total and lightning quick loneliness which each new loss of a comrade, more than a hundred of them, burned deep into my soul, until it left in my eyes an emptiness, and on my face an air of absence which is, or so they say, my permanent expression today. After four years of fighting with a squadron of which only five members are still alive, emptiness has become for me a densely populated place. All the new friendships I have attempted since the war have made me only more conscious of that absence which dwells beside me. I have often forgotten their names, their laughter and their voices have receded farther and farther away, but even all I have forgotten makes the emptiness at my side the most fraternal thing I know. The sky, the ocean, the beach at Big Sur—I always haunt those empty stretches where there is enough room for all those who are no longer there. I keep trying to fill the void with animals, with dogs, with birds, with elephants, with books, and each time a seal throws himself down from a rock and swims toward the shore, or when cormorants and sea gulls tighten their circle around me, my craving for friendship and for company takes the form of a childish and ridiculous hope and I cannot help smiling and stretching out an imploring hand.
I forced my way through the crowd of twenty or thirty generals who were going round and round in circles like a lot of herons fishing in a marsh, and headed straight for the switchboard.
Through the telephone exchanges of Mérignac and of Bordeaux, the last gasps of a country in its death throes were reaching the outside world. When Churchill hurried to France in an attempt to prevent the signing of the armistice, it was from Bordeaux that the lines carried his angry voice; it was from Mérignac that a few curious generals were still trying to discover the full extent of the disaster; it was from there that the journalists and ambassadors who had followed the Government in its retreat from Paris cabled and telephoned. Now it was all almost over, and the lines were becoming strangely silent, and over the whole country, in the dying army, the responsibility for taking decisions in the cut-off units had fallen to the company or even to the section level. There were no more orders for our generals to give and the last twists and spasms of the national agony were taking place in the tragic skirmishes of a heroic few, a matter of hours or even of minutes, just barely the time to die, short, bloody, spasmodic, silent fights which could be followed on no maps and are recorded nowhere, except in some mother’s heart.
I found my friend Sergeant Dufour at the switchboard, which he had kept going for the past twenty-four hours. His face was running with the sweat of that hot June, a sweat that was coming from the very pores of France. There was a look of pigheaded obstinacy on his face and the burned-out stub of a cigarette was hanging from his lips. His cheeks were covered with a hard stubble which gave him a more than usually rough and aggressive appearance. There must have been the same angry, insolent and mocking look on his face when, three years later, he fell in the Maquis under German bullets.
Ten days earlier, when I had tried to get a message through to my mother, he had said to me with a cynical twist of the lips that “things aren’t as bad as all that” and that “the situation doesn’t justify so extreme a measure.” But now it was he himself who had sent for me and was giving me this chance, and that fact told me more about the military situation than all the rumors flying around. He was watching me in a rage, almost with hate, all his buttons undone, and indignation, contempt and a rebellious refusal to submit and accept defeat somehow showed even in his gaping fly and in the three deep horizontal obstinate lines on his forehead—and it was his features that I borrowed some fifteen years later when, writing my Roots of Heaven, I was looking for a face to give my hero Morel, the man who didn’t know how to despair, how to give in. He watched me, with the receiver at his ear. It was as though he were listening to music with a sort of grim delight I waited while he stared and, under his eyelids, red and smarting from lack of sleep, there was still enough room for a spark of gaiety. I wondered what conversation he was overhearing with such sans-gêne. Perhaps that of the Commander in Chief with his advanced elements? My curiosity was soon satisfied.
“Brossard’s off to England, to carry on under de Gaulle. I’ve just arranged for him to say good-by to his wife. What about you, sugar? Maybe you’ve changed your mind?”
I shook my head and he nodded approval. That’s how I learned that Sergeant Dufour had been blocking all the lines just to give a few rebels a chance to exchange a last cry of love and faith with their families before leaving them forever. The generals, politicians and other schemers, busy with the armistice, were meeting with silence from the telephone exchange.
I harbor no resentment against the men who were responsible for the defeat and the armistice of 1940. I understand, only too well, those who refused to follow de Gaulle.
They were too snugly dug-in in their warm and nicely furnished intellectual holes, which they called “the human condition.” They had learned wisdom, that poisoned draught with its sickly taste of humility, renunciation and acceptance, which the habit of living drips, drop by drop, down our throats. Well read, knowing, prudent, experienced, subtle, cultivated, skeptical, secretly aware that Man is an impossible temptation, they had sadly welcomed Hitler’s victory as being in the nature of things. Conscious of our biological and metaphysical servitude, they had quite naturally agreed to give it its logical social and political conclusion. I shall even go further and say, without wishing to insult anyone, that they were right, that they had reason on their side—and that fact alone should have been enough to put them on their guard. They had reason on their side, in the sense of prudence, of refusing to plunge into adventure, in the sense of “let us keep out of this”—in the sense that would have spared Jesus from dying on the cross, would have kept Van Gogh from painting, my own Morel from defending the elephants, Frenchmen of the Resistance fro
m being tortured and shot, and which would have united in the same nothingness, by keeping them from being born in tears, blood and sacrifice, all mankind’s cathedrals and museums, all our civilizations, religions and empires.
And it goes without saying that they had not been exposed to my mother’s simple-minded idea of France. They felt no obligation to risk their lives in defense of a nursery tale, of a never-never land in the heart and mind of an old woman. I cannot hold it against them that, not having been born in the wastes of the Russian steppe, of mixed Jewish, Tartar and Cossack ancestry, they should have had a more calm, realistic and levelheaded view of France.
A few minutes later I was listening to my mother’s voice on the telephone. I am quite unable to put down on paper what it was that we said to one another. It was a succession of cries, of words, sobs and primeval animal sounds which have nothing in common with any articulate language. I have ever since had the feeling that I can understand animals. When, in the African night, I lay in my tent listening to the voices of wild beasts, I always recognized those that were cries of pain, of terror, of utter panic. Ever since that telephone conversation, I have instantly recognized, in all the forests of the world, the cry of the female who has lost her young.
The only comprehensible words, poor, comic words borrowed from the age-old vocabulary of men at war, were the last that reached my ear. When silence had already fallen between us and it seemed as though it was all over, when there was not even a crackling on the line and the silence seemed to have swallowed up the whole country, I suddenly heard a ridiculous voice, sobbing out far, far away: “We’ll get them!”