‘Private Palfy,’ he said nervously, ‘I have decided to speak to you myself. You have arrived at this training depot in a car that demands financial resources well beyond the means of a private soldier, second-class. At such a moment as this, that represents something of a scandal. It must cease. Remove that Austro-Daimler, which offends the patriotic gaze of all of us, and let us see it no more. On another matter, having received a report from the officer in charge of mail, I must warn you that you do not have the right to receive letters addressed to you as “Private Baron Palfy, second class, Yssingeaux”. The use of titles, be they real or false, is forbidden in military correspondence below the rank of lieutenant. I could have had the duty sergeant inform you of these matters. I preferred to take them up with you myself. I trust that you understand the seriousness of my warning. You may go …’
Palfy sensed that the colonel had been on the point of saying ‘my dear baron’, but had stopped himself in time. He saluted, replaced his cap and, after a sparkling about-turn, went out. The Austro-Daimler was sold, piece by piece, to Yssingeaux’s three garages. A scrap merchant bought the chassis. Crushed, it would be used to make artillery shells, an excellent way to return the steel to its country of origin. With the rest of the army watching France’s borders, the training of new recruits and reservists continued in the serenity and calm of an imperturbable, determined Auvergne. A warrant officer taught two hundred fighters the unbeatable way to win a battle: as soon as tanks were sighted on the horizon, all they had to do was dig a hole fifty centimetres wide and one and a half metres deep. When the tank reached the infantryman, he crouched down, waited for it to pass over him, then straightened up and shot the tank from behind. This clever tactic was known as the ‘Gamelin hole’ after the general who, from his operational headquarters at Vincennes, was commanding the Allies. Simple, but someone had to come up with it.
Palfy, with his good humour and sarcastic comments, helped Jean put up with this idiotic life. Their evenings were spent writing enthusiastic letters, hoping that they would be read by the censors. Madeleine was the first to reply to Palfy. Jean received half a page from Albert.
I have no right to judge you. Freedom is one and indivisible. My faith remains intact and I shall stick by it. I swore to myself that you would never be a soldier. My disappointment is very great. I expect it will finish me off. I’m an old man. Don’t ever turn up at my house in uniform, I shall shut the door in your face.
Albert
In mid-September Jean was summoned to the guardhouse. A lady was asking for him. It was Antoinette, in a grey dress and little provincial hat, her features drawn from two nights spent on trains. She started when she saw him with his head shaved, then smiled when he told her he had done it as an act of defiance. A good-natured lieutenant granted him a pass till midnight. Jean accompanied Antoinette to the Hôtel d’Auvergne, where she had booked a room. They had dinner in the low-ceilinged restaurant, not far from where the colonel was eating and watching them out of the corner of his eye, mildly disconcerted at this intake that contained barons and privates, second-class, their heads shaved like billiard balls, who held hands with elegant young women clearly of good family. Jean did not hide his pleasure at seeing Antoinette again. She was a link to a time in his life that it felt good to cling to, to remember what happiness had been. He did not look at her as he once had. Faded already, she was no longer the heady flower of their trysts beneath the cliff and in the barn, the sad lover of his last night at Dieppe before his departure for England. He found her gauche in comparison to Geneviève, and even to those worldly English wives who had slipped into his room at night during his weekends in the country. She lacked Chantal’s freshness. But she was Antoinette, his friend from the beginning, the first girl who had known how to make him happy and make him suffer. She had also braved two nights on a train to see him and bring him socks she had knitted herself, chocolate, books, and money. All pretexts that failed to hide the feelings that she no longer dared show him directly. She also brought him something even better than these presents: news from Grangeville. Chantal had returned to Malemort and taken over the farm from her father, who had been mobilised. Her mother refused to speak to her. In the evenings she rode to Grangeville on her bicycle to meet Antoinette. They spoke a great deal about Jean. Gontran Longuet, a corporal in the Train des Équipages, had turned up for two days’ leave dressed in a comicopera uniform and brandishing a stick. Chantal had refused to meet him. Michel had been enlisted in a signals company in which, along with other pigeon fanciers, he helped train carrier pigeons that, whenever the handle on the field telephone broke, connected the headquarters at Vincennes to General George’s forward command post fifty kilometres away. Marie-Thérèse du Courseau, settled into a hotel at Compiègne very close to her son’s unit, had the great joy, thanks to the influence of her brother, deputy and member of the commission on the uses of tobacco in the Assembly, of dining with her son every evening. There was not a soldier in the French army more mollycoddled than he was. Joseph Outen, an officer cadet in a fortress regiment, was standing guard somewhere on the Maginot line, where he filled his spare time with the study of Zen Buddhism. The abbé Le Couec had got himself into serious trouble. Three days after war had been declared, a pious bigot had reported to the gendarmes that in knocking at the door of his rectory she had heard the abbé speaking German to two men who had hidden themselves in a bedroom before the abbé answered her knock. Monsieur Le Couec had been questioned for forty-eight hours by the military police before being released. He insisted that he did not know more than three words of German and had been speaking Breton to his friends. Now, every morning, he had to register at the gendarmerie. (Jean did not interrupt Antoinette, but the memory of Yann and Monsieur Carnac came back to him. What had become of those two strange figures?? Let us not spoil the suspense by revealing too soon how they will surface once again.) Albert, likewise, had been arrested in Dieppe for insulting a deputy in the street. The deputy in question had voted for war in the Assembly. Having learnt that his attacker was a disabled veteran, highly decorated and mentioned five times in dispatches, the politician decided not to press charges. But Albert was under surveillance by the gendarmes and forbidden to leave Grangeville.
After dinner, under the envious gaze of the colonel and a major, they went upstairs to Antoinette’s room. Jean made to kiss her. She pushed him gently away.
‘No, my darling. Just on the cheek, please.’
‘Is there someone in your life?’
‘Absolutely nobody. I’m twenty-five and an old maid, I promise you, for the rest of my life.’
‘So?’
‘Sit down, dearest Jean. Do I always tell you the truth?’
He lowered his gaze. This time there was no escape. His heart was racing, and he turned so pale that Antoinette hesitated.
‘I could still say nothing.’
Jean breathed deeply. He needed his strength and courage to start out on this new stage of his existence, in which he would know whose son he was.
‘Go on,’ he said, closing his eyes.
She stroked the shaved nape of his neck, as if she were stroking a large, sad cat.
‘I love you,’ she murmured.
Her hand was soft, the light, gentle brush of a mother putting her child to bed. He would have liked to sink into sleep, his face buried in Antoinette’s thighs, lulled by her touch and smell.
‘Have you ever had any idea?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Not the slightest?’