In the end, it was Corap who got his hands on Abd el-Krim, a full-scale raid, forced him to surrender, no fuss or bother, prisoner, parcelled up, packed off to La Reunion, Corap’s claim to fame, his last, the rest was less brilliant, he made general, in May 1940 he has an army, the 9th, facing the panzers, this is a touch trickier than with comic-opera peasants, Corap screws up, army in disarray, sacked, or rather retired from active service, the rout of 1940, ‘The Great Adventure is buggered!’
Preferable to behave like a buffoon, at least you weren’t taken by surprise in 1940, the rout was the answer to the question put to me in 1918: Max, how did you manage to keep going? you said it was for love of country, because you believed in it, patriotic consent, you came back from the war with a military cross, a medal and several citations, rank of reserve Captain, twenty years later you find yourself up against the Germans with your medals, and you realise that in 1914 there’d been no consent given, you hadn’t agreed to any such obscenity, you obeyed, it was obedience, if you went you died, if you didn’t you died, gendarmes to bully us out of our fear, ‘On your feet, you dead men!’ And in 1940 people remembered, no one waited, tell it how you like, the chiefs of staff screwed up, the holidays with pay which meant that aeroplanes weren’t built, the ministers ran away, all the reasons you like, the truth is that if men kept their heads down, it was because finally they did what they’d been too scared to do twenty years before, what their fathers had been too scared to do, they had no wish to be guts hanging from a tree or have their heads blown off, ‘so on your feet, you live men!’
And this time the living were too numerous for the gendarmes to arrest them all or for the colonel to have them shot, the firing-squads and the gendarmes kept their heads down just like everyone else, before everyone else did, meaning and hope? no thanks, we gave already.
De Vèze watches Max and the historian’s wife, a birdbrain and a buffoon, and she dares to talk about anti-heroes, the obverse of history, what does she know about it? That’s what you get when you let people speak who know nothing or laugh at everything, de Vèze feels like provoking an incident, another voice is heard, not Max’s, ‘he would die surrounded by men with whom he would have liked to live’, the continuation of the death of Kyo, no, not that!
It’s the young woman who is continuing to recite the words, why is she interfering? They’re all the same, you look at them, they are aware of it, the hell with her, never touched a gun in her life and she talks about anti-heroes, she’s wrecking everything, blue-stocking, the others have gone quiet, go on, recite away, it’s tea-time at the Comédie Française, she goes on, ‘he would die as each of these men had died, because he had given a meaning to his life’, an odd look comes over the faces of the other guests as they listen.
As if it was some miracle that I should know the passage by heart, that a woman should be interested in anything other than bindweed in a hedge or the penises of the men around the table, the Ambassador might well be intelligent but he feels obliged to preen himself because I’m wearing a thin dress and am married, ‘what value could be placed on a life for which he would not have been ready to die?’ and Philippe who had no idea I’d read this novel, he thinks it’s enough for him to love me, to marry me and now looks at me furiously because tonight I didn’t wear a slip, a modern husband, I’ve seen him from all points of view, ‘death surfeited with fraternal bleatings, a gathering of the vanquished where multitudes would recognise their martyrs’, Monsieur Goffard’s got a nerve, no respect for his author, he’s usurped his role, actually Malraux is much more attentive to people than I’d have thought, has style, no tics, he acts out a lot of what he says, uninhibited, ‘a bloody legend from which golden legends are made’.
*
‘You probably know all about the Tukhachevsky affair? I won’t press it,’ Lilstein had said, ‘at least that’s one story I don’t need to tell you.
‘Anyway if any people in Paris ever pick up your scent, they have to be able to see a trail, don’t be a perfectionist, don’t cover all the tracks in your life, an adolescent’s dream, some harsh treatment which might have given you cause for resentment, and don’t behave as if you’d forgotten the story of your father’s life, everyone knows it, you must give the guard dogs something to think about, they’re only dogs, above all don’t break off any relationships which might be held against you, they’ll need to be able to hold things against you, lead whatever life you please, leave the same tracks as Mr Average, and everyone leaves the same tracks as you will, and your pursuers will go round and round in circles, they’ll start admitting the possibility that there is a fake traitor (does more damage than a real one), the idea is that those who are looking for you will conclude that the hunt is costing them more than the game is worth, that’s where the Russians showed real genius in running the Cambridge spies, the English only decided very late in the day to smoke out their moles because they’d been finding that trying to identify them was more costly than what the moles were costing them.
‘You have only one thing to fear, sometimes you are too brilliant, much better be diffident, gauche, the sort of man who wipes his feet on the doormat when he’s leaving your house, brilliant analyses, awkward gestures, you have to give people the feeling that they’ve got something to teach you, they like teaching people things, you’re on a bike with stabilisers on the back wheel, a long avenue of chestnuts, autumn, sun on dead leaves, you’re not sure of yourself, a great many people will want to teach you to ride your bike without those stabilisers, just for the pleasure of having shown young people how things are done.
‘They will help a young gentleman of France such as yourself, they will back you, push you and watch you speed along the avenue of life, on two wheels, their hearts will swell with pure didactic joy and you too will laugh aloud to show them how so very pleased you are, you know who set up the Tukhachevsky operation?
‘No, it wasn’t German counter-espionage, not Canaris, I was right in thinking there are gaps in your encyclopaedic knowledge, a tremendous coup, the entire high command of the Red Army and the top echelon of Soviet espionage wiped out from 1937 onwards, in just over a year, no, it wasn’t one of Stalin’s mad moments nor was it just political, the tyrant who gets rid of senior army officers who might make a bid for power, Stalin of course would have liked to, and certain generals might also have been tempted, but that in itself wouldn’t have been enough, it needed a small spark of genius, it was supplied by a piece of shit, which is why it’s hardly ever talked about, Heydrich, the Nazis’ top knife-man, the spark of genius did not come from a civilised German, a professional like Canaris or Gehlen, it came from a sadistic piece of shit, and the element of genius here was that it was not direct, the way Marshal Tukhachevsky made contact directly with the Nazi top brass was too obvious.
‘Heydrich did much better, he began with a copy of a directive from Hitler ordering the Gestapo to keep tabs on the general staff of the Reichswehr because it looked as if German generals were plotting something with Tukhachevsky and his little Moscow comrades, the Hitler directive was quite genuine, Heydrich had asked Hitler to draft it for the good of the cause, and then proceeded to fatten up the file bit by bit, a few forged letters from German generals with signatures copied from cheques, plus various documents signed Tukhachevsky forged by an expert, references to meetings which might have taken place when Tukhachevsky was on missions abroad, banter, bogus banter made to sound bogus, in one of the letters a German general talks of their shared passion for violins.