Under a Sign

Colonel de Beaufort had summoned him for nothing! Or almost nothing. Miffed, Lieutenant Schreiber goes back to his tank; the whole squadron has already left. Over the radio, he is ordered to remain at the edge of the forest to warn of a German counterattack. He decides to do a reconnaissance over the terrain separating him from the enemy. He crawls, scanning the surroundings with binoculars. Suddenly, from the turret of his tank, one of his men flags him over to tell him this: Lieutenant Mauclerc (the man who took command at the front of the group) has just been killed!

“This was such a blow to me that I instinctively thrust my fingers into the earth; I was still lying stretched out among the trees. I squeezed the earth where I could have been buried—in place of Mauclerc. Regaining my senses, I saw this figurine in my hand: a small porcelain virgin without a head. A sign. There were no houses in the surrounding area. I would later learn that Mauclerc had been decapitated by a shell.”

He speaks about this with a confounding simplicity, which makes a person want to tell him not to concentrate too much on games of chance, those fateful coincidences of heads or tails, those “signs of destiny.” We’re in the country of sixty million Cartesians, Jean-Claude!

It is with the same level of candor that he has always told the story of his discovery of God. On the afternoon of June 17, 1940, the young soldier leaves the hospital at the Chateau du Hâ fort in Bordeaux, dragging his wounded leg. Fleeing the heat, he pushes open the door to the cathedral, which is completely deserted. No burst of spirituality, just the desire to stop banging against the cobblestones with his crutch and to wait in the cool for his train that leaves late that evening. He sits down, exhausted, worn out by the pain, and feels drowsiness begin to weigh on his eyelids. The shadow of the nave, the luminous openings of the stained-glass windows, the Christ above the altar; all of these things are mixed together in a single sway of fatigue. It is then that a voice, very distinct, reaches him: “What are you waiting for to join us?” The soldier opens his eyes, meeting the Savior’s gaze. He will ask to be baptized in the church in Ribérac in Dordogne and will preserve for his entire life a faith that is insatiable and fierce.

He says it and writes about it this way. Illumination. Revelation. The road to Damascus walked, in Bordeaux, on his lame leg.

It’s hard to avoid a sigh of compassion: “Sweet Jesus! Doesn’t Lieutenant Schreiber know about the corrosive acid his words are falling into? The prevailing mentality is one in which intelligence must be cynical and derision replaces all forms of judgment. A story like this could only elicit a viperine jeer: a guillotined virgin, a Christ who starts talking, you’ve got to be joking!”

To avoid the vipers, does this tone that borders on naiveté need to be adjusted? Should Jean-Claude be persuaded to add a few sentences about the ambiguous familiarity that unites every soldier with death? Death is everywhere, in the mad variety of mutilated, disemboweled, and burned bodies. And yet, mysteriously, death has not yet touched his body, this young body that breathes, sniffs the scent of the earth on the outskirts of the Black Forest, and comes to believe that death does not see him, or else she has decided to spare him. Or perhaps, by an inconceivable harmony of words, movements, thoughts, and wishes (or prayers?), a secret understanding has linked him to death; from now on, she will pass just next to him, making him understand that she has seen him, but she will leave him intact, killing in his place a certain Lieutenant Mauclerc. And so that he can be sure of the reality of this choice, she will put into his hand a small, decapitated relic. The old man could tell any number of stories about how war makes even the most convinced rationalists begin to watch for signs and collect talismans.

He could also describe the infinite confusion of the young Officer Cadet Schreiber who, limping on his crutch, is crossing Bordeaux one day in June 1940. He does not know that the war is lost and that the armistice will be signed in a few days. He is still hoping to take up arms again and return to his regiment. At twenty-two, he carries within him a past that a person rarely possesses in peaceful times: the keen understanding of courage and fear, the ordinariness of killing, the extreme ease with which men slide toward an animality that is multiplied tenfold by the power of machines. Most of all, he knows the insidious nearness of death: the tank burning in the place where his own had passed a few seconds before, a volley of shots that whips over the turret he has just dived into. A coincidence? Fate? Or a supernatural force that is watching over him?

Our reason mocks this uncomplicated mysticism, doesn’t it? To become less taunting, all we would have to do is find ourselves, just once, beneath the pretty little trajectories of tracer bullets, the ones that draw out their path in the darkness as they approach your body. Anyone who has experienced this knows that at that point, a person would accept even the most irrational protection.

I have often spoken with Jean-Claude about those moments in war when our arrogant reasoning suddenly becomes humble and seeks support in ideas that at first sight appear quite far-fetched. Signs of destiny, omens … before we call this young soldier superstitious, we must be able to explain to him what place reason has in the monstrous clashes of populations, the extermination of millions of humans, the planetary meat mincer of lives that he was swept up in at such a young age.

It is this soldier, rattled in every cell in his being, who pushed open the door to the Bordeaux cathedral.

The old man would prefer not to add these kinds of extra comments to his story. He wants to tell the facts as he experienced them, to recall his emotions without their retinue of wise ruminations. But more importantly, as he has gotten older, he has become more and more aware of a supreme truth, one far broader than his memories as a young soldier and far simpler than the doctrines the fiesta philosophers were constructing.

For him, this truth had the force of a new birth, a new path he could step onto, distancing himself from the farce playing out all around him with its bloodshed, its rapacity, its comedy of vanities, its exaltation of reason, of history.

“War is one hell of a summary of the world,” he told me one day. “Death, survival instincts, hatred, love, flesh, the spirit; the soldier has the chance to probe the depths of all of these things and in a very short time. And if he is not stupid, he learns fundamental things! He acquires an unequaled knowledge of his mortal body, of its laughable limits, and also knowledge of his role in the great comedy of society; in war, we see the very same human theater, but the pistols are not made of plastic. Yes, the same merry-go-round is turning. What is most important comes afterward, when the soldier discovers that it is possible to go further than the whirlwind of those bodies filled with the desire to live and the fear of dying. Yes, when he understands that there is a way off of the merry-go-round.”

A way off of the merry-go-round…. The memory of these words returned to me in those sad days of post-June 18, 2010, when our hopes were dying out one after the other.

Charles Dupêchez, with the help of his assistant and friend, Sylvie Goguel, fought until the end: “I called one of our authors, he promised me he’d talk to someone at Libération.” Nothing. “Wait! There might be a little piece in Paris-Match next week.” Nothing at all! The summer holidays were approaching, everyone was getting ready to leave, and a soccer championship was occupying the screens, the radio waves, and people’s minds.

Jean-Claude did not show any bitterness. These disappointments with the media must have seemed of little importance to him next to the death of Lieutenant Mauclerc. No, the merry-go-round of small Parisian games did not interest him. He only regretted that he hadn’t been able to make the names of his comrades heard, for before they died, some of them, like him, had caught a glimpse of the way.

It was while thinking about these men that he once confided to me, in a voice that was very detached from the daily sounds around him: “If I lived to be this old, maybe it’s so that I would have the time to tell their stories.”