A Sentinel with No Replacement

He goes back to Berlin for his new assignment, most of all to reassure himself that the thread of his life as a soldier can be taken up once more. He very quickly realizes that this is only an illusion; the fighter in him is not easily accustomed to the bureaucratic routine of army staff.

In March 1946, Lieutenant Schreiber returns to Paris. For good. The theater of the postwar is waiting for him. He will have to choose a role, accept the rules of the game, and play a character in this great human production. He will have to conceal from other people what he lived through during the war, avoid bringing up battles, the tanks in flames, and the comrades whose shadows never come back to him except in dreams or rare moments of solitude: Lieutenant-Colonel Poupel, Captain de Pazzis; this rosary of names and faces that emerge from the depths of his sleeplessness—Berton, Gilot, Leper, Catherineau….

He knows that in order to succeed in his new life, there will be a price to pay: forgetting.

In truth, this more or less agreed upon erasure will never end. He still tells stories about his years in the war, of course. But the most important things, he is well aware, are never said. So he decides not to bother the people who are listening to him and adopts a light tone, peppering everything with anecdotes and quips. Little by little, his life as a soldier freezes into a series of episodes that are both realistic and entertaining, but—most importantly—are adapted to the “channel switching” spirit of potential listeners. He is no fool: this stylized mode of recalling the past is simply a way of forgetting the real Lieutenant Schreiber. Is it also a way of betraying him? Or perhaps, he sometimes tells himself, it is a way to better protect himself from the fickle curiosity of indifferent people.

The games of the world drag him along on their merry-go-round. He plays along quite well: he wins, loses, triumphs, falls, and picks himself up again. Journalism, diplomacy, politics, advertising, public relations … the passion in this professional and social jousting seems to erase the memories he has of his youth. In photos he is seen in a tuxedo, a smile straight out of Hollywood, beautiful creatures on his arm. New York, Shanghai, Sydney, Tokyo, London, Dakar, San Francisco, Montreal … the heady urgency of the day-to-day, the rivalry and the balances of power, the ideological clashes; what incredible stimulants! And, too, what excellent drugs for forgetting.

He boasts about rubbing elbows with the major players in this worldly spectacle: de Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard, Mitterrand, Chirac…. He talks about it in a book, tracing a very distinct border between the first person on that list and those that followed him. Successes, defeats, revenge, women—lots of women—friends one has to be afraid of, and enemies whose hostility is so consistent that they eventually win his respect.

He has experienced all of these things; he has even learned that behind this whirlwind of masks, a very large void is always hidden.

Yes, triumph and disaster, those two impostors….

And then the century (the millennium!) comes to an end and the old man realizes that his life contains, insofar as a human existence is capable, the essence of the twentieth century. Wars, political paroxysms, intellectual fashions, momentary artistic whims, technical frenzies, and the constant stream of novelties whose sense our spirit no longer has the time to define and whose aftermath it no longer has the time to predict.

A future that is more and more immediate and invasive begins to cancel out the time when one could still turn toward the past, remember, and speak in silence to those who are no longer here.

Most of all, he discovers that throughout all of those decades (throughout a life!), a young soldier within him had remained faithful to the memory of his comrades in arms, saving in his memories the name of each one, recalling their courage and their frailties as men, their joys, their injuries, and their deaths.

Like a sentinel refusing a replacement, Lieutenant Schreiber keeps watch over this past when it no longer interests anyone else.

He is eighty years old when, in a bookstore, an unusual title catches his eye: Cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer (This France We Forget to Love). He smiles, thinking about the world today in which we swear only by worldwide development, globalization, and other planetary fantasies. A world where humans are very proud to move, bouger, constantly, never noticing that this obsessive change for change’s sake conforms to the great streams of merchandise and capital, the pillaging of one continent for the profit of another, and touristic servitude.

He begins to turn the pages: a particular idea of France, homeland, de Gaulle. A glance at the name of the author. Ah, you have to really be a foreigner to write this. He sighs: “The word homeland has almost become a bad word these days. How is it that my attachment to this French soil has not prevented me from traveling the world, speaking several languages, all while knowing that my homeland is definitely here, in France, in the small village of Montfrin that I liberated in ’44 with my tank platoon?”

He goes back to the interrupted chapter and suddenly the lines quiver before his eyes! To the memory of Colonel Desazars de Montgailhard. To the memory of Parachute Captain Combaud de Roquebrune. Both of whom were killed in 1944 for the liberation of France.

He continues reading with the eyes of the young Lieutenant Schreiber: “The size of the division is at present reduced to a few men. At eighteen hundred hours, the enemy, wanting to finish it off, launches a massed attack. Using the ammunition of the wounded and dead, the cavaliers of the second division resist. The machine guns fire their last rounds. The enemy is pushed back….”

From our very first meeting, Jean-Claude’s story would become a profound echo of other French lives about which, at the time, I knew only a few fragments. A sweeping and nuanced voice that, by its power of invocation, gave each character (whether an army chief or an ordinary soldier) a true depth of destiny.

One day, as we know, Jean-Claude began listing the comrades in his regiment who appeared in an old photo. One silhouette remained unnamed, a tall man with a sad smile. “Wait, his name will come back to me. He’s the guy who was killed at Dunkirk. His name was … ah!”

The idea for the book came from this brief silence in his memory. That soldier, forgotten in a wartime snapshot, absolutely had to get back his name.