Rienne left the barracks about ten o’clock; he meant to walk out to Thouédun for half an hour. Outside the barracks he saw Lucien Sugny. The young man came up to him timidly; he had been waiting for three hours in the hope of seeing him. They walked towards the High Street.
Lucien was suffering. He made the gestures of an old man, of his father coming home slowly, at dark, from his field. Like his father, he would not after this evening recognise his youth if it met him in the road.
“I don’t understand,” he murmured, when he had finished telling his story. “Why is he doing this? What has happened?” He hesitated. “I can’t feel any confidence in myself. Compared with him, I’m nothing. And if he runs away—”
Rienne had listened to him in silence. He was mildly sorry for the young man. Real as it was, deeply as it cut into his life, Lucien’s grief would heal quickly. A few weeks, perhaps only a few days of action, and it would begin to trouble him so little he would not notice the day when it was only a light scar—which never reminded him that it was there. For his own grief . . . he accepted it and placed it to one side, to be looked at as soon as he had time. It would make its own place in his mind, leaving him room to enjoy hunger, weariness, sleep, a June morning at Thouédun. It would enter into all of them as a shadow, and he would become used to it. He could not help a moment of anguish before he spoke to Lucien.
“Don’t think about it very much. It’s foolish to measure a life by one act—even an heroic act. You know, I’ve seen so many men become heroes in an excited moment—or because at that moment there was nothing else they could do. All the same—a lie of that sort is worth something. . . . Less, of course, than the everyday choices. He made so many good and honest choices—you know that. What you don’t know yet is that an illness can turn a hero into a coward.” He saw that Lucien was listening avidly, and smiled. “I don’t know how to account for this illness. It’s everywhere, like influenza after the last war. . . . We’re not allowed to talk about honour. And yet as soon as you prefer anything to it—security, or power—you fall ill. And to be well you needn’t be successful or lucky. I advise you to keep your heart to yourself. Don’t bet with it on another person—who has always the right to let you down. I’m not saying, Don’t love anyone. I don’t want you to starve! I’m only warning you not to expect so much.”
To console Lucien, he had said more than he cared to. He was now tired of the young man’s company. Lucien noticed it, and with an awkward phrase took himself off.
The narrow street leading to the High Street had become a dormitory. People were trying to sleep, some in their cars or carts, others on the pavement. Between the houses it was almost dark. Rienne had to step over these bundles; they made him think of the casualties at a clearing station, young men with grey faces and an M on their foreheads. Two men were talking in low voices . . . “I’m our village baker.” . . . “Which is your village?” . . . “Oisemont near Abbeville.” . . . “And who is baking bread for the village now?” . . . “If you’d tell me where all of them are. ...” A child looked up at him from under a deep forehead. Her back against a house door, a woman feeding her baby smiled with satisfied love: another woman was lying between two sleeping children; her face wooden, carved out of a block of fear, she stared blankly at the passers-by-seeing what? Another child, a boy, fair-haired, with large eyes half-open in the face of a mediaeval angel, smiling and candid . . . another . . . and another . . . their heads floating on the darkness. Rienne felt a profound weariness. This war is too nearly murder, he thought.
In the High Street he came on a straggling half-dozen soldiers who had managed to dodge the military police at the bridge. They were drunk; none of them had his rifle. He let them stumble past. Steadying himself after an impulse of anger, he tried to think calmly about the disaster they symbolised, how far it had gone, how quickly it could be repaired.
He turned back, to the Quai Gambetta, to look at the river. Looking up-stream, he watched the poplars darken and the mass of willows turn the colour of dead cinders; the light was leaving with regret all the shapes it had amused itself by living in during the day. It withdrew from level after level of the river; its place was taken by a sharp scent of seaweed, dry grass, and of water after the sun has been on it. The whole valley of the Loire was breathing as gently, as sensuously, as that woman with her infant.
For a moment he confused Émile’s failure—failure of the good clever little Émile—with the failure of France. Both of them had refused to fight. What Thiviers said, what Labenne said, what any leader said, was only the word of millions of Émiles. The moment he had thought this, he felt France protesting in him against such a foolish lie. There was another France—a child a thousand years old, a seed which was a tree with its seeds—living, unborn, immortal.
He gave the sleeping Loire a polite friendly smile, and turned towards his village.
It was close on midnight when he reached it and the vicarage, but he knew that neither Letourneau nor Mourey would go to bed before two or three. He knocked on the window. Letourneau opened to him, without surprise.
The moment he was inside the room, he told them that Émile was resigning. He thought he was explaining it by his illness; in fact, with more than his usual coldness, he was saying that Émile was too anxious to be approved of—poor child, he had all the intellectual courage in the world and very little emotional courage; he had never understood that public opinion, rewards, were not worth the trouble.
“. . . It is perhaps my fault. I was always encouraging him. I didn’t think.”
“He’s a politician,” Jean Mourey said delicately. “He has been playing a fine political game, and hoping that events would save him from having to oppose Monsieur de Thiviers and the others.” He hesitated. “And then her influence.”
He kept out of his voice the contempt he felt for a sterile love.
Rienne did not answer. He thought of Marguerite with pity: lately he had guessed at a profound uncertainty under her air of confidence. She could have been a good creature, he thought.
“Women have more need of stability,” Abbé Letourneau said. “An unstable woman does so much harm.” In his childhood, in a village in the melancholy Sologne, he had believed that succubi exist; he still half believed it. This woman had fastened on Bergeot.
There was a silence, then Mourey said,
“What is happening?”
Rienne said coldly, “I was wrong to be pleased when we attacked in May. I didn’t realise our weakness. G.H.Q. was completely outmanoeuvred. We had an excellent plan, with one flaw—any German N.C.O. could foresee it and make a counter-plan. We—without imagination, without aeroplanes, with only our poor Meuse and our poor generals. . . . When we’ve thrown the Boches out, we can divide the blame between treachery and incompetence. I don’t believe in treachery, it’s not French.”
“You can say that because you only know one sort,” Mourey cried. “There are others. We have at least ten million traitors, each with his single field, each prepared to quarrel with his neighbour over a centimetre of ditch, only agreeing with him to despise and dislike change. It’s charming. Every year it brought thousands of Anglo-Saxons to admire our towns where nothing has changed since Louis-Philippe, our peasants still holding a right of way from Edward the Third of England, the admirable clarity of our ideas, so clear that not one of them told us about the catastrophic change in the rest of the world or prepared us to deal with it. Our famous way of living—strictly bourgeois, sterile, dying. It was childless, and too stiff itself to defend the country. . . . War or no war, the crisis would have come—and we should have failed.” His voice became slower, much too slow. “And now—we shall have a peace harder than defeat, and a despair worse than defeat. . . . A death harder than death.”
“Despair,” Letourneau said, smiling, “is neither French nor Christian.”
“You priest,” Mourey said gently.
“As you like,” Letourneau said. “But I know that men, even Frenchmen, can be saved by loving them. Plan the most delightful life for them—except, of course, for the rebels!—and they’ll spite you by dying out.”
“The Third Republic is finished,” Rienne said. “None of us need worry about it. Leave that to its debtors—of all nations.”
“What comes next?”
“Too soon to think of it.”
“I can tell you what comes,” Mourey said with energy. “A plague of dictators—big and little. No nation, not even Germany, breeds them so richly as we do. Why? Because, for all we boast so much of our intellect, we act first and think afterwards. Luckily, when we begin thinking, we laugh—and that pricks the dictator. Until then . . . There are Frenchmen who never knew what fraternity meant until they began to feel kindly towards Hitler—”
The priest had been listening, leaning untidily in his chair, his big head dragging forward his body. He began to talk without arrogance but with a rough authority—you would have said an honest shabby professor, too honest to do well for himself.
“Jean is half right. We have too many memories which misled us about the future, too many single fields adding up to one jealousy, too many disinterested ideas forming a philosophy of egoism; too much logic, too many good habits, too much clarity. They held a young mask over our age—young, fresh, and, alas, impervious. If defeat cracks it, a young France may astonish the world. I say may—because peoples have died.” He lifted his head—it was an effort. “It is sad when a people like the French dies.”
There has never been a people like France, Rienne thought.
Mourey said with anger, “France can’t die.”
He is thinking of his wife, Rienne thought.
“When a people loses its faith in God,” the priest said, “and even in the abstractions its new teachers held up to it—I mean justice, liberty, and the rest: when you have taught them to take everything to pieces, every belief, what have you left them that makes a people of them? The hatred of barbarism and Germany. A day has come when even that has failed you.”
Mourey walked to the bookcase—full of theological works he would never touch. He stood with his back to the room. “In a different sense from the Germans, we had begun making barbarians of our children. I wasn’t allowed to teach them that the spirit is more necessary than the body.”
“You wished it, my dear Jean. It was you dismissed God from your class.”
“It was perhaps a mistake,” Mourey said. He would not say more. This was already too much. “I believe in human beings,” he said quickly.
The priest smiled.
Surely it’s simpler? Rienne thought. When he is told to clearly enough, the same Frenchman who spends his life counting sous dies without expecting any interest on them, thinking only of handing them, with the house, to his son. . . . He dies. . . . He kills, which is harder. . . . Afterwards he is forgotten, of course—what does it matter?
“This is not the end of us,” he said.
He looked at his watch. His half-hour—and the familiar sense of standing between the two poles, the two clarities, the two idealisms, of the French spirit—was up.
“The end?” Mourey cried. “How could it be? How, if we were put out, would the rest of the world see to read? . . . Suppose the Boches destroy Chartres—there’s still Joinville, Villon, Fouquet, to speak for our Middle Age; even if they burn all our Loire’s cathedrals and châteaux they can’t burn Gregory of Tours, Rabelais of Chinon, Ronsard of la Poissonnière, Descartes of la Flèche. . . . Non omnis moriar. . . . Even the Gestapo can’t kill writers, painters, musicians, philosophers, who had the good taste to die before June this year. . . .”
“You’ve forgotten Vigny—at Loches,” Rienne said with energy. “He’s still France.”
“You see? You both make your act of faith,” Letourneau said, smiling.
He went with Rienne to the door, and watched him out of sight. Better than Mourey, he knew what Rienne had paid for the minute when he let them discuss his foster-brother. Rienne was walking slowly, almost as slowly as if he had to carry someone.
The sky was dark enough, half an hour after midnight, for the stars to seem close. From here, Rienne could not see his house, but he gave a thought to it and Agathe: she was certainly asleep, she kept her habit of getting up at four in summer and six in winter. All those great names, he thought, names of a town, a province, a poet, Racine, Ingres, Aquitaine, the Marne, are not France. France is some good little nothing each of us is protecting behind the names. For Mourey, it is his quiet Michèle. Letourneau’s must be folded in a nothing belonging to that Gontran none of us has seen. And mine? . . . Not worth asking—the answer was always an evening in his garden at Thouédun, between the house and Agathe’s herbs.
He turned his back on the village and walked towards Seuilly. The quietness was not peace. In this calm starlit France, the poor humble France of Agathe suffered. He did not, even now, deny his confidence of early May: he withdrew it into himself, into such safety as June had left to any Frenchman.
When, he thought, you have lost everything, when as a child you have slept in the street or a ditch, under the threat of bombs, do you, if the bombs miss you, die of despair? Don’t you find, in the ditch or in the ashes of a house, a young confident France, willing to put off until tomorrow the prudence of old age, the serenity of old age? Willing to risk everything today, in the intention of being rich—also today—in freedom, herbs, and a modest little eternity?