Promise at Dawn Page 28
I left the bus at the Place de France at Casablanca, where I almost immediately ran into two trainees from the flying school, Forsans and Daligot, who like me were trying to find some way of getting to England. We decided to pool forces and spent the day wandering about the town. The gates of the harbor were guarded by gendarmes, and there was not a Polish uniform to be seen in the streets: the last British ship carrying the Poles must have left long ago. About eleven o’clock that night, we found ourselves under a gas lamp in a mood of utter dejection. My determination had begun to weaken. I told myself that I had done everything I could, that no one can be asked to do the impossible. The fatalism of the Asiatic steppe had stirred in me, and was whispering poisoned words into my ear. Either there was such a thing as destiny, in which case it had better show its hand, or there was nothing, and one might just as well curl up quietly in a corner. If some just and serene force was really watching over me, well, it was about time for it to take over. My mother had never stopped blabbering to me of my future victories and the laurels which were one day to be mine; she had made me certain promises, and it was up to her, now, to get me out of this mess.
How she managed it, I don’t know. But I suddenly saw coming toward us, apparently from nowhere, a good Polish corporal. We flung ourselves on his neck: he was the first and last corporal I have ever kissed. He told us that the British cargo boat Oakrest, carrying a contingent of Polish troops from North Africa, was due to sail at midnight. He added that he had come ashore to buy some delicacies which would make a pleasant addition to the rations. That, anyway, was what he thought. But I knew what power had made him leave the ship and guided his footsteps to the gas lamp shining down upon our melancholy.
The heavenly corporal handed Forsan his Polish tunic, Daligot his Polish cap; as for me, I had only to bellow Polish orders to my companions to get us safely past the gendarmes guarding the harbor gate, and up the gangplank, helped, it is only fair to say, by the two Polish officers on duty, to whom I explained our situation in a dramatic whisper in the lovely tongue of Mickiewicz:
“Special liaison mission. Winston Churchill. Captain de la Maison Rouge. Intelligence Service.”
We passed a quiet night at sea in a coal bunker, lulled by noble dreams of glory. Unfortunately, the Polish bugle woke me just as I was making my entry into Berlin on a white horse.
Morale was good and only too willingly assumed a declamatory form: our English allies were waiting for us with open arms; brandishing our swords and our fists against the hostile gods who thought they could reduce mankind to slavery, we would blazon upon their satrap faces the indelible scar of our dignity, in the manner of the oldest champions of our race—bad literature perhaps, but it helped.
We arrived in Gibraltar in time to witness the return of the British fleet, which had just accomplished the noble deed which will shine forever in its history, that of sinking the finest French naval units at Mers-el-Kebir. It is not difficult to imagine what effect this news had upon us. Our last hope had rewarded our confidence with a foul blow.
In that pure and sparkling light of the Mediterranean where Spain welcomes Africa, I had only to raise my eyes to see the gigantic figure of Totoche, the god of Stupidity, standing upright in the harbor, legs apart in the blue water, his head thrown back and holding his belly; his eyes closed in an apelike grimace, he filled the sky with his enormous laughter. He was wearing for the occasion the cap of an English admiral.
My first thoughts were for my mother. I could see her striding down the street, cane in hand, on her way to break the windows of the British Consulate at Nice, in the Boulevard Victor Hugo. Her hat sat sideways on her white hair, a cigarette hung from her lips and she was summoning the passers-by to join her in an explosion of indignation.
Unable, in these circumstances, to remain a moment longer aboard an English ship, and having noticed a destroyer flying the tricolor, I tore off my clothes and plunged into the sea. My rage, horror, sorrow and confusion were absolute and, not knowing what to decide, on what saint to call, I had followed my instinct, which told me to make straight for the flag of France. While I was swimming, the idea of suicide occurred to me for the first time. But there is nothing very submissive in my nature and my left cheek is not at anyone’s disposal. I therefore made up my mind to take with me into the next world the English admiral Somerville, who had so successfully carried out the butchery of Mers-el-Kebir. The simplest way would be to ask to see him and then, after saluting smartly and offering my congratulations, to empty my revolver into his hard-won medals. I would only too gladly have let myself be shot afterward, and I found the thought of a firing party far from unpleasant It seemed to go very well with my type of beauty.
I had two kilometers to go and, the water being on the cold side, I grew calmer. After all, I wasn’t going to fight for England. The foul blow which she had dealt us was inexcusable, but at least it proved her fixed determination to carry on the war. I decided that there was no reason to change my plans and that it was my duty to go to England, in spite of the English. I was, however, already within two hundred yards of the French ship and felt the need of a breather before tackling those two kilometers again. So I merely spat into the air—I always swim on my back—and having thus got rid of the English admiral, Lord of Mers-el-Kebir, I continued on my way to the destroyer. I made for the companion ladder and climbed on board. An Air Force sergeant was sitting on the deck, peeling potatoes. He saw me emerge stark naked from the sea without showing the least sign of surprise. When one had seen France accept defeat and Great Britain sink the fleet of her ally, it seemed unlikely that one would find anything surprising again.
“All right?” he asked politely. I explained my situation and learned in return that, far from returning to North Africa, the destroyer was on its way to England with twelve Air Force sergeants who were joining de Gaulle. We were in complete agreement in condemning the action of the British fleet and also in concluding from it that the English were bent on continuing the war, which was, after all, the only thing that mattered for the time being.
Sergeant Caneppa—Lieutenant-Colonel Caneppa, Companion of the Liberation, Commander of the Legion of Honor and twelve times mentioned in dispatches—was destined to fall on the field of battle in Algeria eighteen years later, having fought on all the fronts where France has given its blood—Sergeant Caneppa suggested that I should stay on board, not only to avoid having to sail under the British flag, but also to help with the potato fatigue, a most undignified job for a sergeant. I brooded over this new factor in the situation and came to the conclusion that, no matter how fierce my indignation with the English might be, I would rather take passage under their flag than give my time to household chores so much at odds with my inspired nature. With a friendly wave of the hand, I dived back into the sea.
The voyage from Gibraltar to Glasgow took seventeen days, in the course of which I discovered several other French “deserters” aboard. We made friends. There was Chatoux, later brought down over the North Sea; Gentil, who was to crash with his Hurricane fighting one against ten; Loustreau, killed in Crete; the two Langer brothers—the younger was my pilot before being killed by lightning in the sky of Africa, and the elder is still around; Mylski-Latour, who changed his name to Latour-Prendsgarde and was brought down in his Beaufighter, off the coast of Norway. There was the man from Marseilles, Rabinovitch, known as Olive, who was killed while training; Chamac, who was blown sky-high with his bombs in the Ruhr; Stone, the imperturbable, who is still flying, and others, all with more or less false names which they assumed in order to protect their families in France from reprisals, or merely in order to turn the page upon the past. But among all the “deserters” present aboard the Oakrest, there was one man whose name will always sound in my heart the answer to every doubt and every discouragement. His name was Bouquillard and, at thirty-five, he was far and away our senior. Rather small and slightly bent, never to be seen without his beret, with brown eyes in a long and friendly fa
ce, his apparent calmness and sweetness of temper concealed one of those flames which sometimes make France the most brightly lit place in the world.
He became the first French “ace” in the Battle of Britain before being brought down after his sixteenth victory. The roof of his cockpit jammed and he couldn’t bale out, and twenty pilots standing in the operation room, their eyes riveted on the black maw of the loud-speaker, heard him sing the great battle hymn of France until his Hurricane exploded and, as I write these lines, facing the ocean whose rumble and roar have drowned so many other voices, so many other defiant cries, the song comes suddenly to my lips and I try to resurrect a past, a voice, a friend, and he rises again at my side, alive once more, and smiling, and it takes all the vastness of Big Sur to make enough room for him.
No Paris street has been christened after him, but for me all the streets of France bear his name.
CHAPTER 35
In Glasgow we were welcomed by the pipers of a Scottish regiment who marched ahead of us in their full-dress scarlet. My mother had a great love of military marches, but the horror of Mers-el-Kebir was still upon us, and turning our backs on the pipes as they paraded up and down the park where our camp was set up, the whole French Air Force withdrew silently into our tents while those splendid Scots, touched on the raw and more scarlet than ever, continued with true British obstinacy to fill the empty glades and avenues with the sounds of their hospitable welcome. Of the fifty of us there, only three survived the war. In the hard months that followed, in the skies of England, France, Russia and Africa, they accounted among them for one hundred and fifty enemy aircraft before being felled themselves. Mouchotte, five victories; Castelain, nine; Marquis, twelve; Léon, ten; Poznanski, five; Daligot . . . But what is the point in whispering names which no longer mean anything to those who hear them? What point, since they have never really left me? All that is still alive in me belongs to them. I sometimes think that I continue to live only as a matter of courtesy and that, if I still allow my heart to go on beating, it is only because I have always loved animals.
It was shortly after I reached Glasgow that my mother stepped in and prevented me from committing an irreparable folly, the stigma of which I might well have carried for the rest of my life. I was still smarting from the injustice inflicted upon me at Avord when I had been cheated of my officer’s rank. Nothing would have been easier now than to repair that injustice myself: I had only to sew a second lieutenant’s stripe on my sleeve. After all, I had a perfect right to it and had been deprived of my commission only by the treachery of a few skunks. Why should I hesitate? But it goes without saying that my mother took a hand in the matter at once. It wasn’t that I asked her opinion, far from it: I did all I could to keep her in ignorance of my little project, to dismiss her from my mind. But in vain. The thought had hardly entered my head when she was there beside me, stick in hand, and the language she used was extremely wounding. That wasn’t how she had brought me up, that wasn’t what she expected of me. Never, never would she let me cross her threshold again if I were guilty of such an act! She would die of shame and grief. In vain did I try to run away from her in the streets of Glasgow, my tail between my legs. She followed me everywhere, brandishing her stick, and I could see her face clearly, now imploring and indignant, now with that expression of incomprehension which I knew so well. She was still wearing her gray cloak, her gray and violet hat and a string of pearls around her neck. It is the neck that ages most quickly in women.
I remained a sergeant.
At Olympia Hall, in London, where the first French volunteers were assembled, well-bred ladies from good English families came regularly to chat with us. One of them, a ravishing blonde in military uniform, played innumerable games of chess with me. She seemed determined to bolster up the morale of the poor little French airmen, and we spent many hours with a chessboard between us. She was a very good player and beat me hollow every time, and then at once suggested another game. For a French volunteer dying to do some fighting, to have to play chess with an extremely pretty girl, after seventeen days at sea, is one of the most nerve-racking experiences I know. Matters reached such a point that I found it preferable to avoid her altogether and to watch her from a distance trying rocades against an artillery sergeant who, after a bit, began to look as melancholy and dejected as I. There she was, blonde and desirable, pushing her chessmen over the board with a slightly sadistic gleam in her blue eyes. She was a truly vicious number, if ever there was one. Never, never have I seen a girl from a good family do more to demoralize an army.
At that time I did not speak a word of English and found it very difficult to make contact with the natives. Sometimes I was lucky enough to make myself understood by gestures. The English are sparing of gesture but I did manage somehow to make them see clearly what I wanted. Ignorance of a language can even be helpful in certain circumstances, simplifying relationships to the essentials and eliminating useless preliminaries and monkey tricks.
While at Olympia, I struck up a friendship with a young fellow whom I shall here call Lucien. After several days and nights of a more than usually turbulent good time, he suddenly decided to put a bullet through his heart. In the course of three days and four nights, he had managed to fall madly in love with one of the hostesses at the Wellington, a night club much patronized by the R.A.F., only to be deceived by her with another client and plunged, in consequence, into such gloom that death seemed to him the only solution. Actually, most of us had left France and our families in circumstances so extraordinary and tragic that the nervous reaction sometimes did not take over until some weeks later and then often in a completely unexpected manner. Some then tried to cling to the first life buoy that drifted within reach; in the case of Lucien his buoy having straightway floated off, he had sunk straight to the bottom under the weight of his accumulated despairs. I, personally, was attached, though at a distance, to a solid buoy and one which gave me a feeling of complete security, for mothers are seldom unfaithful to their sons. I did, however, get into the habit of drinking a bottle of whisky a night, in one or another of the spots where we dragged our burden of impatience and frustration—the only time in my life I had touched alcohol. We were exasperated by our sense of stagnation, longed for the controls of a bomber, longed for a skyful of juicy Germans, and night after night sought release from tension with some willing soul, or with a bottle, when the limits of human nature made themselves felt. I was most often with Lignon, de Mézilles, Béguin, Perrier, Roqufère, Barberon and Melville-Lynch. Lignon lost a leg in Africa, went flying with an artificial one, and finally was shot down in his Mosquito over England. Béguin was killed dive-bombing a target in France, after eight victories on the Russian front. De Mézilles left his left forearm at Tibesti, was given an artificial one by the R.A.F., and was killed while piloting a Spitfire in England. Pigeaud was shot down, and badly burned, in Libya. He escaped from an Italian ambulance, covered fifty kilometers on foot across the desert and dropped dead as he reached our lines. Roquère was torpedoed off Freetown and devoured by sharks under the eyes of his wife. Astier de Villatte, Saint-Péreuse, Barberon, Perrier, Langer, Ezanno the magnificent and Melville-Lynch are still alive. We sometimes see one another, but not very often. All we had to say to one another has been killed.
I was lent to the R.A.F. for a few missions in Wellingtons or Blenheims so that the B.B.C. could solemnly announce that “the French Air Force bombed Germany last night, operating from its British bases.” The “French Air Force” was a friend of mine called Morel and myself. The B.B.C. communique filled my mother with indescribable enthusiasm since, for her, “the French Air Force operating from its British bases” could mean only one thing: me. I found out later that, for several days, she had paraded up and down the Buffa Market, with a radiant face, spreading the good news: at last her son had taken matters into his own hands.
I was next sent to Saint-Athan and it was while I was on leave in London that Lucien, after phoning me at the hotel to s
ay that everything was fine and morale was high, put the receiver down and killed himself. At the time, I was furious with him but my fits of anger never last long, and when I was detailed, with two corporals, to escort the casket to the little military cemetery at P—I had quite got over my resentment.
At Reading, a bombing raid was in progress and we had to wait for several hours. I deposited the casket in the checkroom, took the receipt, and off went the three of us in search of a drink, warmth and a welcoming smile. But the atmosphere in town was scarcely what you would call gay and, in an attempt to ward off the prevailing gloom, we must have drunk more than was good for us. As a result we returned to the station in no fit state to carry the box. I got hold of two porters, handed over the receipt to them and had them put the object in the luggage van. We arrived at our destination in a complete blackout, with only three minutes in which to recover our pal, and, making a dash for the van, we had just barely grabbed the box before the train began to move off. After an hour’s journey in the R.A.F. lorry awaiting us, we were at last able to dump it in the guardroom at the cemetery gate, where it was left for the night, together with the French flag to be used at the ceremony. We caught some sleep, sobered up and next morning, arriving at the guardroom, found a cowed English N.C.O., who stared at us with bulging eyes. Arranging the tricolor on the casket, he had noticed that it bore on its side, in black letters, the advertising slogan of a very well-known brand of stout: Guinness Is Good for You.1 Whether it was the porters, rattled by the bombing, who were responsible, or we, in the blackout, I shall never know, but one thing was obvious: somebody, somewhere had made a mistake. We were naturally very much upset, especially since the chaplain was already waiting, with six soldiers drawn up beside the grave to fire the funeral volley.
At last, concerned above all else to avoid exposing ourselves to the charge of irresponsibility, which our British Allies were all too ready to bring against the Free French, we decided it was too late to back out and that the prestige of the uniform was at stake. I looked the English sergeant straight in the eye; he nodded, to show that he understood, drew a deep breath and, hurriedly replacing the flag on the crate, we carried it on our shoulders to the cemetery and lowered it into the grave. The chaplain spoke a few words, we stood to attention and saluted, a volley was fired into the air and I was suddenly overcome with such a rage against the quitter who had given in to the enemy, opened a gap in our ranks, and broken the bond of our harsh companionship that I clenched my fists, words of abuse rose to my lips, tears to my eyes.