his bare pectorals.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘given the combined brain power of a middle-aged police sergeant and a youngish garde mobile, I reckon it will take them a good five minutes to work out that no one works on the roads on a Sunday and that actually we are Sergeant Tuberge’s tormentors. So no need to hurry. Put your shirt on, my fine friend, and let’s get out of here and find a drink.’
‘I’ve met one of the women of my dreams,’ Jean said.
‘Your little shadow puppet in the blue lawn dress?’
‘How did you guess?’
‘I have a talent.’
‘I spoke to her.’
‘Are you going to have many children?’
‘We’re going to make love endlessly, but we’ll only have two children, and not until several years after we marry.’
‘I want to be godfather to the eldest.’
‘You shall.’
They put their rough wool shirts back on and left the roadworks behind. The streets behind Place de Jaude were deserted, the citizens of Clermont-Ferrand having gathered en masse to watch the parade. The army, decried and scorned for years, had again become a symbol, one of the values the French were trying to cling to. The first parade by Jean and Palfy’s regiment since the armistice belied the merciless thrashing Germany had inflicted on it and cast a pious veil over the missing, the million and a half prisoners who at that very moment, crammed into livestock wagons or straggling along distant roads, were being herded to camps in Silesia and Poland.
Palfy seemed to know where he was going. Jean followed him, but so absentmindedly that his friend stopped and said, ‘Hello! Where are you?’
‘A small part of me’s with the lovely Claude, the rest is with our friend Tuberge. The look on his face …’
‘Yes, we mustn’t forget it. One day, Tuberge, one day I’ll have your guts for garters. When I think about that poor priest …’
The night had been calm except for a few volleys of tracer rounds fired over the canal, mostly either to let off steam or soothe nerves, or just for the pleasure of emptying a magazine and watching a salvo describe a clutch of luminous parabolas like a storm of meteorites in the warm June air. Early dawn light spread along the canal’s banks. A trickle of water carried with it planks of wood, a hat, a dead cow with a monstrously distended stomach and a pair of corpses, two men tied together at the wrist and obligingly floating on their stomachs to hide their mortified expressions. Then, from out of nowhere, a fat, bare-headed priest appeared on the enemy side of the canal, walking along the towpath and reading his prayer book. His incomprehensible appearance seemed to cause time to stop, forcing a respite at the exact moment when the fighting was due to restart.
‘It’s a truce from God!’ Picallon, the seminarian, said, and for once no one laughed at him.
A damp freshness enveloped the numb men in their hastily constructed dugouts. Mosquitoes had devoured their hands and exposed faces. Lance-Corporal Astor had woken up blind, his eyelids swollen and stuck together with pus. He was led off to the command post, where a hypothetical ambulance was waiting. Jean and Palfy, smeared with lemon juice, had escaped the onslaught and subsequent wholesale itching. The priest followed the towpath, hard by the water’s edge, as far as a destroyed footbridge, where he turned round and, with his nose still in his prayer book, retraced his steps. The last shreds of grey night were drifting away in the sky. The cleric’s florid face was visible, as was his unkempt white hair and too-short cassock that revealed a pair of skinny calves ending in stout ankle boots very like those worn by the abbé Le Couec.
Behind the group to which Jean and Palfy belonged, Sergeant Tuberge and Lance-Corporal Pomme had dug themselves a comfortable hole which they had reinforced with planks and sandbags. Thirty metres to the rear of his men, Tuberge claimed it was a good command post because he could receive orders from the main CP without endangering a runner. In reality it was clear that his location would, at the first sign of trouble, allow him to take to his heels down a well-protected trench, at the end of which lay one of those elastic positions so beloved by communiqué writers at headquarters. But Tuberge, a loudmouth well skilled in the boasting arts, still managed to impress with his physical presence and underworld vocabulary. A one-time lathe and milling-machine operator at Renault, he had prepared himself for battle by wreaking havoc among the female population of the villages where the regiment had been billeted during the phoney war. Jean and Palfy had not been surprised to find that the first shots fired in anger had revealed the sergeant’s possession of a hitherto unsuspected virtue: enormous caution.
The priest once again about-turned, impervious to the threatening silence that accompanied his reading and private prayers. He was like a tightrope walker exorcising his vertigo at the war to right and left and keeping his balance on the high wire with a long pole, in this case, his prayer book, the word of the Church. At that hour, with the day still undecided, a priest’s innocence and the word of the Church seemed truly supernatural. They held the guns silent, forbade bloodshed, and returned to its state of French grace the whole tract of peaceful countryside whose colours were beginning to awaken. Everyone felt the moment, except for Tuberge, who grumbled something about fifth columnists and parachutists disguised as priests, then picked up a light machine gun and raked the black cassock with a volley of fire. The priest’s hands flew to his flushed face, and his body, after a moment’s hesitation, toppled into the canal, joining the dead cow whose horns had become tangled in the weeds. As the echo of the machine gun died away a sudden breeze sprang up, rippling the surface of the canal. The cow moved off again, dragging the priest behind, his wet cassock floating just below the surface.
‘Bastard!’ Picallon yelled, standing up in his dugout and shaking his fist at Tuberge.
‘You shit, it’ll be your turn next!’ Palfy shouted in the sergeant’s direction.
Tuberge prudently kept his head down, but shouted back, ‘The next one to complain gets a bullet in the back of the neck from me.’
‘Do we shoot him?’ Jean asked in a low voice.
‘He won’t show himself,’ Palfy answered. ‘He may even be making his way to the rear at this very moment.’
Five hundred metres away on the far bank, from behind a half-ruined wall, a machine gun fired several rounds and jammed. Silence fell again between the lines, as if death were taking a last deep breath before exhaling its fire across the meadow and through the willows. Everything looked frozen: the cumulus clouds in the pale sky, the canal’s greenish-black water, the leaves in the trees and the tall grass stained with the red spots of poppies that had been winking there since sunrise. The stillness might have carried on for an eternity if a crow had not suddenly swooped low over the canal, attracted by the corpses that floated there. Someone muttered that it must be the priest’s soul, as the crow settled on a willow branch, but the priest’s soul must have been as cursed as his body. The first mortar struck the willow, splitting it in two, and the blast scattered black crow feathers in every direction. Shells began falling far beyond the canal, behind Jean and Palfy, shredding trees and blasting funnel-shaped craters out of the meadow. Then a salvo hit the canal, sending up geysers of brackish water. Progressively the range was adjusted until at last it started pounding the bank held by the French in their foxholes. For an hour, shells arced through the sky, emitting soft whistles as they fell. They could be seen climbing merrily, twisting as they rose, then gliding and hesitating, as if choosing their targets, and boring their way down through the air to land in a spray of earth, grass and stones, their dull thud as they burst
