A Wandering Soldier

He does not change his tone to speak about his second campaign. Still a factual precision worthy of the Journal of Marches. In April 1941, he receives the following official notice: “Lieutenant Schreiber being Jewish, the law of October 3 1940 must apply to him fully.” The same day, he is given his Médaille militaire. A pleasant bureaucratic caprice: let’s decorate this soldier, and while we’re at it, let’s dismiss him from the army.

His second war begins when he enlists in the Resistance group “Liberté,” which would later be merged with the “Combat” group. While completing his doctorate in law at the University of Grenoble, he often makes the trip between that city and the family home in Montfrin, giving him the opportunity to collect weapons abandoned by the army, transport them to their recipients, and lay out caches.

His noticeable sternness is to be expected: “That day, I handed weapons over to Simon and Jean Nora. Later on, they would fight in the Vercors.”

“And what if your clandestine activity had been discovered, Jean-Claude?”

“I would have been arrested, clearly.”

He does not develop this hypothesis further. As is the case with the Journal of Marches, one must read between the lines, hear between the words: every day those three young men, Jean-Claude, Simon, and Jean, risked being caught red-handed next to a cache or in their own homes, being torn from their sleep, and then being subjected to interrogations, torture, and a selection of limited options: death during transfer to a camp or while in a camp or, more likely than not, under the bullets of an execution squad.

I am on the verge of voicing this possibility, which would lend their actions a dramatic human texture, as well as what we—in order to avoid the word heroism—will call the force of a remarkable achievement. Jean-Claude succeeds, once again, in mitigating this serious turn. “You know, in Grenoble the police were not always openly hostile to the Resistance. I remember one evening a commissaire warned me about the likelihood of a raid at one of the caches where I had weapons stocked. In Montfrin, on the other hand, the policemen took me for an anti-national renegade. In fact, if the Gestapo were coming to arrest me on November 11, 1942, it was because of information delivered by the local police…. With Sabine, I was able to flee from under their noses at the very last minute.”

An escape, the side of the road unsettled by the caterpillar tracks of German tanks, the station in Tarascon, the missed train to Marseille, and a hotel where, right in the faces of their pursuers, the young couple live a long morning of love.

I have understood this for some time: Jean-Claude will never know how to, or will never want to, talk about his war if it means burdening others with the painful moments, accentuating the fears and sufferings, or complaining about the agonizing landscapes of occupied cities, patrolled streets, and houses turning into traps.

His credo of lightness is not an aesthete’s posturing. He acquired this vision—one that does not blacken the world or demonize men—in the years when the world was infinitely dark and men, in their cruelty, were competing with the most diabolical scum. He opposed that universe with his soldierly courage, his cheerfulness like that of a “young tyke,” his smile like an “enfant.” His comrades, those “old” fighters of thirty or forty years of age, were grateful to him for these instants of humanity that resisted the dull horror of Panzers and the piercing screams of attacking Stukas.

At first, beneath the bombs and volleys of shots, he must have had to make an effort to continue to be what the others saw in him: a smiling and fearless tiny bird. Then, this nature, fashioned by the war, became his own nature, his way of living and seeing the world. And age can do nothing to change it.

“He will never know how to tell it differently,” I think. So much the better! For this is how, I am certain, he would speak about it with his comrades in arms today, if he could find them.