It was rather difficult to imagine what sort of man he had been in France, in the days before the War, because even with the uniform of the French pilot he did not look very French. He looked more than anything else like an English publican: large, stolid, bright-eyed, with very red cheeks flushed raw with blue. You might otherwise perhaps have thought of him as a taxi-driver in Boulogne, which is where he came from, sitting-half the day in the sun on the running board of the taxi while waiting for the boats to come in and now and then going heavily across the street, cap on the back of his head, for a drink or two in the shade of the café. He looked less French than any Frenchman in the Squadron and more English, perhaps, than any Englishman. The only very French thing about him was a slight pout of the lips and a shrug of the shoulders as he used his favourite expression—“C’est tout”—by which he always minimised any achievement that you thought remarkable. He said what he had to say in the heavy and formal manner of an English police sergeant giving evidence straight from the note book at the local petty sessions. He was the sort of man who did not stop to describe the view. What he had done was, according to him, very straightforward, very simple, very dull, and he gave the impression, entirely without fuss, that there might even have been a mistake about the Croix de Guerre.
He had, in fact, been a civilian pilot before the War, operating, I daresay, on one of the French internal airways. He had all the calm tenacity of temperament that makes the good bomber-pilot and from his description of life in the early part of the War, if you could call his flat statement of facts a description, you got a picture of a routine that was duller than the driving of English tourists from the docks at Boulogne to the cathedral in a taxi on hot summer afternoons. You could picture the French pilots, though he did not describe it, playing banque in the crew rooms of the dispersal hut, and the ground crews playing strange games with sous in the dust outside. You could picture them off duty, rather swagger in their dark-blue uniforms with much gold braid, as they sauntered on spring evenings in the local town, wondering perhaps not of what kind of War it was and if it would ever end, but also if it would ever begin.
When it did begin, with shocking suddenness, in the May of 1940, Poirot was almost immediately shot down and the end of things was already very near. But three or four days of the life of France still remained when he got back to his unit near Boulogne—just long enough for him to discover that there were no longer any planes, that there would be no planes, and that all he could do now was to see that his men were armed and that they understood the state of things and were ready. There was no swaggering in blue and gold uniforms in the evening sunlight now. Poirot and his men moved into Le Touquet. They were no longer part of the French Air Force. Having no planes they were, sooner perhaps than most Frenchmen, disinherited. The British were leaving, but Poirot and his men had no orders to leave and when the time at last became very short, they dug themselves into the casino.
I do not know how long they remained there: three or four days perhaps; at any rate until things became hopeless. They were—I gathered it more from the expression on Poirot’s face than from anything he said—very tenacious. As it became hopeless a few of them slipped out under cover of darkness. The rest, with Poirot, remained, and they remained there until there was nothing to do but surrender, or be captured, whichever way it was.
“They began to march us back to Germany,” Poirot said, as if it were no more than a walk along the coast from Le Touquet. The weather was very beautiful in the early summer of that year and the nights were starry and dark and fine and I could imagine Poirot being driven eastward along the hot roads like one of a string of cattle, his red, solid bovine face giving no sort of hint of the man he was. The second night—or it might have been the third or fourth night, at least while they were still in France—Poirot escaped. If the impression is that he turned round and walked back, as if the walk beyond Le Touquet had begun to bore him, the impression is as good as any other. In two days he was back in Boulogne. It was full of Nazis now and the war, for all that mattered, was over.
For three weeks Poirot hid there with friends. They may have been bakers or taxi-drivers, or café proprietors or grocers, or officials from the port. Poirot, for very good reasons, does not give the artistic details. Supposing they were bakers, it became necessary in time to move to the café. It had become very dangerous. But in time, as June came on, it began to seem safer. Poirot then got hold of a bicycle and began to ride south, and I seem to see him, very hot, very red, very tenacious, pounding along the straight French roads between the pillars of poplar leaves in the bright June nights like a competitor in one of those non-stop national bicycle races of which the French were so fond. He must have ridden for a long time, sleeping by day, riding by night, until he came to within reach of the unoccupied zone. There all the bridges over the Loire were guarded and so Poirot left the bicycle and swam the river, and once again I seem to see him, huge, red, tenacious, pounding now at the water with his sun-brown arms in immense determination. Swimming across the river, bicycling down the roads, walking back to Le Touquet, hiding in the casino, Poirot all the time seems to exhibit qualities for which we give the French no credit. He moves along to predetermined places like an ox. “C’est tout,” he says, as if he had no imagination at all.
At Toulon, which he evidently reached in the July of that year, Poirot demanded to be demobilised. It was his right. But the authorities, who seemed to have had more than a suspicion of the qualities that lay behind that extremely stolid and phlegmatic face, thought quite otherwise. They were very much in need of men like Poirot. “We need you in North Africa,” they said. It may have been this action of theirs that upset Poirot. He may have reasoned that escaping from Nazis, defending casinos, hiding in houses, bicycling across France and swimming rivers, deserved a slight reward. The reward that Poirot wanted was quite simple. He wanted freedom. Unfortunately the authorities at Toulon had none of it to give away.
But instead, they said in Africa, we will give you the Croix de Guerre. I do not know what kind of a medal the Croix de Guerre is. Possibly it is a very nice medal. Possibly Poirot was very honoured to have it. He does not say. He does not fill in the emotional details of the story. But it seemed to me that he acted with a curious kind of sardonic frivolity for a man who is pleased to be decorated.
What is quite evident is that Poirot had decided that he did not like the Vichy authorities at all. The day when the medals were to be presented to Poirot and his comrades was, as I imagine it always is with the French, a very ceremonial affair: Poirot, who looks so unimaginative and who does not bother with details, did not describe the scene, but it is not hard to see the Glen Martins lined up about the track in the African sun, the blue and braid of the pilots’ uniforms as they wait at attention, the glitter of the big wigs, the ceremonial kisses of presentation. Poirot does not describe, either, his emotions at this scene. But they, too, were probably very direct and very clear. For Poirot was probably the most nervous man of all.
After the presentation of medals the squadrons flew over the drome, giving one of those serene and ordered displays which are part of the ceremonial. Thinking of their flying over the drome, I like to think also of those who were watching below the high officials, the caps of gold braid, the rows of medals, the distinguished uplifted faces watching the circling planes. Poirot does not fill in these details, for the simple reason that he was too high and too occupied to notice them. I like to think very much of the serene solemnity of the official faces, of Poirot flying above them, rather like a rude Donald Duck who does not know his ceremonial manners. I like above all to imagine their faces, their French volubility, their indignant dignity and their final horror as Poirot at last turned his plane away, helped by a navigator and a radio operator who valued freedom, and set his course for Gibraltar.
I like too the way in which Poirot ends his story, phlegmatically, briefly, unexcitedly, as you would expect him to end it.
“C’est tout,” he says.