he was talking about, and nor did he. For a few years after he got back he dreamt of his German companion, of her delicious breasts and her strong smell of milk after she had been milking, but the memory gradually faded and he arrived by degrees at a princely state of apathy for everything that did not belong to his little world of food, wine and work on the farm, where he lived alone with his dogs, cows and two pigs. In which case let us speak of him no longer (in any case his role in this story is about as episodic as it could be) and return to Palfy, Jean and Picallon who, having bid Boucharon, huddled in his hole, farewell, reached a long hedge and then a clearing that they crossed on their stomachs, and finally a sheep pen next to a duck pond. This had been the command post. A table set up outside the door was still strewn with tins of corned beef and sardines, red wine and country bread, and cigars.
‘I’m hungry,’ Picallon said. ‘I could eat a horse.’
‘Eat, young priest, eat. I shall keep you company. What about you, Jean?’
‘No thanks.’
He would never again be able to swallow another mouthful. The smell of blood and human flesh clung to him, and he gagged again, all the more painfully because his stomach was empty. He leant against a tree and stayed there for a long time, staring at a landscape as blurred as the sea bed. Picallon gobbled down three tins of corned beef, a litre of wine, and an entire loaf of bread. The enemy machine gun, still close by, was regularly audible, firing at random in the direction of the canal bank where Boucharon had decided to see how events turned out. Turning away so as not to see the other two gorging themselves, Jean walked into the house. A headquarters map was spread out on the kitchen table, dotted with white and red flags as if for a lesson at the École de Guerre. In their scramble to retreat the staff had left behind the stock of flags, a pair of binoculars, a swagger stick, even a monocle attached to its black string. Jean looked for their canal position on the map and understood why the Germans had not attacked. They had settled for a flanking movement via a bridge ten kilometres downstream. Alerted, the command post had ordered a withdrawal so hasty that only the NCOs had known about it. But the map indicated the local paths as well, and the enemy could not be in possession of all of them. If they moved at night or kept to the woods, they would eventually rejoin the French lines. As propositions went, it was optimistic but not so absurd as to be impossible. Nor would it be the first optimistic proposition formulated by members of the French army since 10 May 1940.
Lacking communications and at the mercy of idiotic wireless broadcasts and a hopeless romanticism, France, its retreating army and its refugees lived in a whirlwind of rumours and lies that, despite the majority being instantly refutable, ricocheted from village to village and unit to unit. The strategic discussions at a thousand Cafés du Commerce had never been blessed by such a unanimous belief in success before, and as the retreat gathered momentum a veritable torrent of misinformation received the same serious consideration: the very night of the German forces’ entry into Paris, Hitler had gone to the Opéra to hear Siegfried and gliders had dropped a battalion of parachutists disguised as nuns on the outskirts of Tours, where they had taken control of the aerodrome without firing a shot; other parachutists disguised as farm workers were giving false directions to the French armoured division and sending it straight into the lion’s den; Roosevelt was about to make available to France and Great Britain five hundred fighters and more than a thousand bombers, with aircrew; a famous singer had been shot: her coded songs broadcast on the wireless had given away troop numbers at the Maginot line; two trains filled with gold ingots were going to buy Mussolini’s neutrality; the German armoured division had only a day’s fuel left and the bombing of the Ruhr was causing strikes in the armament factories; some units were already running out of ammunition; in any case, the president of the Council had announced with a tremor in his voice that ‘Germany’s iron supply line has been cut’ and it had not a gram of steel left.
Jean went outside again, map in hand. Using a spirit stove Picallon was heating up some coffee he had found in a flask, and Palfy was coming back, smiling broadly at his discovery: a hundred metres away, in the shelter of birch woods, were two working tankettes with trailers stuffed with mines, sub-machine guns and ammunition. The tankettes, with which the French army had been supplied in abundance for want of battle tanks, had been assembled at high speed at arsenals to the south of the Loire and lined up under the proud gaze of sergeant-majors to be counted and re-counted. They had proved utterly useless. They looked like cartoon tanks, the kind of thing rich men’s children might play with on the family estate. What terrifying toys they could have been in childish, cruel hands, flattening hens under their tracks, crippling the children of the poor!
With the turret raised, there was room for two inside each one. Picallon could not drive and in any case his height – close to six foot three – made him too big to fit into a tankette. He settled himself on the bonnet of Jean’s instead, accepting, as a consolation, a new sub-machine gun still covered with the oil applied by the regimental armourer, who must have relinquished it only under the most extreme duress.
The convoy jerked into motion, heading south on a forest track through the woods. The tankettes advanced slowly, doing ten kilometres an hour at best. Sheltered by summer foliage and twice cutting across roads that helped serve as landmarks, they reached the edge of the forest where they were forced to move without cover through a hot, empty landscape in which the hay roasted by the June sun was starting to wilt. Three Stukas passed overhead, way up, at well over a thousand metres, mission accomplished, dazzling birds in the midday sun. The road led through a deserted hamlet, then a second where, suddenly, a scarcely human form emerged from a doorway, a ball of sound slumped in a wheelchair. The man was working the wheelchair’s wheels desperately, trying to get away from a pack of excited dogs. Picallon slid off the bonnet and walked towards the invalid. He had been abandoned there with a plate of rice and bread and water that he was protecting, groaning inarticulately, from the starving dogs. At twenty paces he reeked of excrement and urine. Picallon stepped back.
‘What do I do?’ he asked.
‘Kill the dogs before they make a meal of him!’ Palfy ordered.
The sub-machine gun silenced the wheelchair’s famished attackers, and Picallon nudged the corpses into a ditch with his boot. The man shrieked with joy and clapped.
‘That’s enough, young priest, you can’t do any more!’
‘It’s disgusting.’
‘No going soft. Come on.’
They set off again, and the man in the wheelchair tried for a moment to follow them, burping and coughing in the cloud of dust and exhaust gases. Re-seated on the tankette’s bonnet, Picallon began to heat up as if he was being grilled and started to pray aloud to St Lawrence, offering his apologies for not hitherto having appreciated his martyrdom. Jean, having familiarised himself with the tankette’s various directional levers, was following the tracks made by Palfy, who had dived into a series of dusty paths bordered by yellowed, overripe wheat and parched grass. The harvest of 1940 was superb, but there were no men to take it in. From time to time across the fields they saw the distant figures of women in white headscarves, cutting wheat by hand and forking the crop into carts drawn by Percherons whose coats trickled with sweat. But no one turned to watch the two strange vehicles lurching noisily into and out of view in plumes of dust. Jean felt an intoxicating sense of freedom. No more yapping NCOs to order pathetically inadequate defensive fire or a premature withdrawal. He and crazy Palfy were going on holiday, to tour France’s agricultural heartland and discover its bistros where the patronne, in vowels as round as her hips, served ‘her’ pâté de campagne, ‘her’ beef stew, ‘her’ local wine and the pears from ‘her’ garden. But the farms looked like the Mary Celeste, the famous brigantine discovered still under sail in the middle of the ocean, without a crew, with breakfast served on the table, the fire still lit in the galley and not a soul on board. They stopped at some of these farms and called out, and no one came. There might be a dog barking, pigs snuffling
