A Burned Tree

On the day of our reunion in Paris, at the end of October, it is almost hot. A wind out of the south, bursting with sun, is painting a summer tableau in motion: a crowd of people in short sleeves, full terraces, the liveliness of a Saturday (or is it already vacation time again?).

Jean-Claude has just called me on my cell phone to say that he will be a little late. I sit down in a café near his place. I never expected it to be like this: to me his building seems to be inside a vision I have strangely outrun, as though it had been pushed back toward the most ancient years of my life. And that’s what it is, another era, the one of the publication of his book, of our waiting.

I don’t notice his arrival right away. Because of the roadwork that is underway, the taxi drops him off nearly fifty yards away from the entrance to his building. When I see him he has already paid the driver and is entering into the back and forth of people walking past.

It is his black suit that makes him immediately visible; he is probably coming back from a ceremony, most likely a funeral. I remember what he said to me one day: “At my age, the letters one receives are most often death announcements. In fact, I sometimes feel like I am moving through a forest of dead trees.”

In the midst of a crowd of people resembling Southerners, his silhouette looks more like a tree burned in a fire.

I let ten minutes pass before going to join him. Enough time to discern within myself the echo of his words, their slowness, their power.

As I come in, I spot him in the small hallway that extends along the living room in his apartment and whose walls are punctuated here and there with photos. At that very moment he happens to be hanging one up, but the ring on the back of the frame refuses to pass onto the hook. In fact, I arrive precisely when this gesture is becoming exasperating; come on now, aim for that damned hook with this minuscule lasso of a loop!

He turns around, greets me with a somewhat embarrassed smile, and without making another attempt he puts the photo back on the table in the living room. With a quick glance I recognize the snapshot in its old wooden frame. A German city, military vehicles in the background, that young woman in uniform. She’s the one Lieutenant Schreiber met again in May of ’45, in a festive Paris where everything seemed so strange to him.

Jean-Claude lets out a small sigh. “Ah, this hook, worse than a cup and ball game!” But this regret, I know, has an entirely other meaning.

He offers me a glass, sits down, pours himself a golden drop of whiskey, and stays a moment without moving, his gaze drawn toward the rippling of the branches behind the windows. The tiny opening of the balcony door lets in the sound of a television set; the hubbub of a stadium before the match, the excited voice of a commentator who says he is sure that “tonight, millions of French people are going to quiver.”

The old man stands up, shuts the door, and emits a small laugh with a contraction of sadness: “Those poor people, that’s all they have to make them quiver! How could a people become dulled to this extent?”

He sits down again, seeming a little grumpy, but, already mocking himself for having such an attitude, he says, “Forgive me, I’m playing the old grouch. It’s just that there are moments when these silly things hurt more than usual.”

His eyes half closed, he returns little by little to the detachment that had earlier made him so different from the suntanned crowd: a man with white hair, a black suit; a burned tree.

His voice becomes more subdued. “What struck me earlier, at the cemetery, was how easily a life fades away. A slab of stone, a name, and for a curious passerby it’s just a tomb like all the others. Actually, the fading starts well before that. An old woman is walking down the street; people are passing, overtaking her, annoyed at having to walk around this shadow who is moving too slowly. And no one thinks to wonder what her life had been like, her youth. Apart from a few people close to her, no one knows that during the war, as a nurse, she had saved hundreds of wounded men, from Toulon to Strasbourg.”

In his way of speaking, there is the tension of the man whose voice would try to cover the rumbling of a strong wind or stand against the hostility of a multitude. In spite of the closed windows, the rumbling of the television hisses, a background noise blending the screeching of fans and the hysterical squealing of the commentator, the shout of the crowd that is “quivering.”

“And besides, how could I tell people about the life we had? You remember how I talked about General Picard in my book? A week ago I reread those pages … I had the urge to tear them out!”

May, 1940. On the orders of Lieutenant-Colonel Poupel, Officer Cadet Schreiber must find the division HQ, which relocates from one town to another as it follows the chaotic movements at the front. Finally, at nightfall, he succeeds in locating the HQ that is set up in a grocery store. He introduces himself to the general and passes on the message he had been given: the loss of thirty tanks in battle. The man’s response gives him doubts about the reality of what is happening. “What the hell do I care?!” The general is in a flagrant state of intoxication; his kepi is sliding over one ear and his eyes are barely able to make out the young officer cadet standing in front of him.

“At twenty-two years old, the scene felt like I’d been hit on the back of the head with a sledgehammer. That night, something inside of me fell apart. And it was in losing the things I was certain of that I realized how much I had believed in military honor, in the values of heroism and abnegation. As a matter of fact, those were the ideas my father had always held to. In my book, I talked about General Picard like a colorful and pathetic drunk. And yet … I should have explained that we had been betrayed. The battle plan that the general had prepared was well thought out, I know this now. Except there was no longer any overall commander. And Picard saw that for the privates, his offensive was turning into a firing line where our tanks were burning by the dozen. He gave the order not to move to stop the carnage and … he lost it. Yes, I should have written that. But I thought it would have been too long, too hard to understand for one of today’s readers. So I gave the anecdote: a drunken general. Not a bad way to amuse the peanut gallery, eh?”

He bends over the low table and grabs his book, which is lost among the newspapers, and turns it over to look at the back cover.

“And here, you see, they wrote: the anti-Semitism of the French army. That’s not one hundred percent untrue. I ran into a few officers who detested Jews. But there was also Poupel, the commander of our Fourth Cuir. Taken prisoner by the Germans, he managed to get a letter passed out in which he requested a medal for me, talking about my achievements in battle. Can you imagine doing that for a Jew from the shacks of a Nazi camp?”

He almost shouts it. Then, lowering his voice: “Of course, I could have told the journalists about that, if….”

His sentence remains unfinished. The old man guesses that his tone might be interpreted as a sign of resentment or a plea in disguise, and therefore completely futile.

A wrinkle of severity hardens his lips, his gaze sharpens; the people who shamefully ignored his book would have been stared down this way. He adds something in a neutral voice, one no longer intended for all of those indifferent people.

“I am not a writer. If I were, I would try to say what I felt at the moment Lieutenant-Colonel Poupel gave me the order to go look for one of our squadrons behind the German lines. I had already done it a few days before, alone on my motorcycle. I had to redo the mission, but in a different direction. It was a task that was clearly suicidal; a person comes out of that alive once, not twice. Poupel understood this, he knew he was sending me to my death. As he was giving me the order, he started to cry. I was overcome! Here was an officer who had fought in 1914–1918, a veteran soldier, a tough guy. And he was crying! I climbed onto my motorcycle and left. At the entrance to the village, I almost ran into a group of German soldiers. I heard them talking. I found the lost squadron and came back safe and sound. A stroke of luck. And in the end, I never knew quite how to say what a twenty-two-year-old private feels when he sees tears running down the cheeks of an old warrior who had unlearned how to cry such a long time ago.”

Jean-Claude’s eyes become blurred with those tears, the tears of another person; his eyelids redden slightly and, in an unusual gesture for him, he pulls at the knot in his tie and loosens the collar of his shirt. As if he wants to free himself from this civilian clothing and put on his uniform from May 1940.

He stands up with a sudden start and turns around, looking as though he wants to examine one of the photos hanging on the wall. Slowly, he passes from one snapshot to the next, meeting those young faces. The soldiers always smile in front of a lens, even if they would have to die just after the shot was taken. This is what sometimes gives the war archives that almost cheerful side.

His gaze revives these fragments of the past, and his attentiveness leads one to believe that he is in the process of saying farewell to his photographed comrades. He is aware that at his age he will no longer have the chance to talk about their lives. Deprived of his words, they will freeze, as they are frozen in these photos, in vague and anonymous silhouettes.

“There’s no going back now,” I say to myself, “his book has been sent to the masher. Not a trace of it in the press. Not one echo from potential readers. No longer the slightest chance to tell people what his companions in arms lived through and how they died.”

The sense of injustice is unbearable. A paradox: there is a whole stream of chatter and images that pours daily out of newspapers, radios, and screens, but not one line, not one word that makes mention of these soldiers that are on the verge of fading into oblivion. Millions of shiny covers, innumerable clones, feminine or masculine, always flaunting the same obscenity of fashion, vacations, sports, showbiz; a vile sewer that decrees to billions of brainless humans what they should think, love, covet, what they should appreciate or condemn, what they should know about current events and history. The only goal of this mind-numbing enterprise is profit—everyone knows this—disguised with terms like “print runs” and “audience shares.” This system (Léon Bloy would call it “prostitution”) has its disciples. One of them said something like “My shows serve to empty people’s minds in order to make them available to the advertising of Coca-Cola.” Ah yes, advertising on television, dear Jean-Claude, you remember.

No, the life of Lieutenant Schreiber is not compatible with that system.

The old man picks up the photo on the living room table: a young woman in uniform, a German city, a row of naked trees. He looks at this shot for a long time, wipes the glass in the frame, then hangs it on the wall; this time, the loop finds the hook without hesitation and he remains motionless for a few seconds, his eyes fixed on the small gray rectangle.

I think again about the “system,” about the indifference that managed to quiet Lieutenant Schreiber’s voice. All of those cowards who sidestepped his book should read just that one sentence in the Journal of Marches: “Thursday May 30. The tanks, under the orders of Commander Marchal, receive a sacrifice mission: that of continuing to fight in order to protect the embarkation of the North Army….”

You, masters of media “prostitution,” lovers of minds drunk on television rubbish, try to understand what these words mean! Men, most of them very young, were going to give their lives so that their comrades could survive and continue the fight. So that their homeland could survive.

This appeal to conscience would be a pointless and anachronistic invocation if one of those soldiers, Lieutenant Schreiber, were not still living among us. It is this same soldier who in the winter of 1944, beneath the whistling of the machine guns, climbed down from his tank and saved two gravely injured comrades. The same one who, when he accepted one of those suicide missions for himself, had seen his commander cry.

Jean-Claude has taken the tour of his small collection of war photos. The one he is looking at now dates from June 1940: his comrades, the “guides,” Lieutenant-Colonel Poupel in the middle, and that tall soldier whose name the old man has forgotten. From now on this forgetting no longer has any importance. The indifferent people have won.

I leave my friend and head home on foot, crossing Paris from south to north. Evening has fallen, bringing an autumn dampness with it after the summerlike illusion of the daytime. The excitement of the match that has just ended can still be heard in the snippets of conversation between people walking by: names of soccer players, opinions about the score.

Earlier, after saying my goodbyes to Jean-Claude, I stopped in the courtyard and turned around. The old man had come out onto his balcony, and in the hazy luminescence of the twilight I made out his silhouette. Then, when he went back into his apartment, I could see his profile stand out clearly against the whiteness of the wall.

Now the memory of an old painting I saw in my childhood comes back to me; a column of soldiers in several rows, seen from behind, anonymous. They are heading off into the night; the only part of them we can see is the rough cloth of their greatcoats. The heavy angles of their shoulders, their helmets that reflect a far-off fire but hide their faces. In this human monolith, one lone glimmer of a person: that soldier. He has turned his head toward us, as if he were awaiting our gaze or a word from us. One more second and he is going to turn around, united with the anonymity of the column. A little like Lieutenant Schreiber, I think, who gave us a sign, waited for a response, and who will now go off into the night of his past. And the whole column of soldiers is preparing to disappear into the darkness.

As I walk, I begin to remember, one by one, the names Jean-Claude mentioned in his book and in our long conversations. I do it out of order, no longer respecting ranks, whether or not they belonged to such and such a regiment, or the chronology of battles in which those fighters took part: Parachute Captain Combaud de Roquebrune, Colonel Desazars de Montgailhard, Lieutenant-Colonel Poupel, General de Beauchesne, Officer Cadet Maesen, Captain de Segonzac.

In my crossing of Paris, each one of these names corresponds to a street, an intersection, a section of riverbank. I am certain that Jean-Claude would have liked to take this nighttime promenade, calling out to the men whose memory his book was not able to save. Lieutenant Ville, Officer Cadet Py, Captain de Pazzis. And also the men who had received that mission of sacrifice in Malo-les-Bains in May 1940. Lieutenants de Vendières, de Ferry, Chief Sergeant Le Bozec, cuirassiers Auvray, Baillet, Péan, Le Bannier.

I end up almost believing that such an outing would be possible before I remember the old man’s age and fragility. Besides, what will remain of these names whispered into the night? Even a book only made them survive for a few months. No, the adventure is over. Jean-Claude must be thinking this right now, meeting the eyes in the old photos on the walls. All of his old comrades will soon rejoin the column of soldiers, without names, without faces.

A forgotten country, I tell myself. A country that no longer hears through the logorrhea of “communications,” the haughtiness of “experts,” the pronouncements of authorized thought. A country rendered invisible behind the holograms of “personality,” mascots, bubbly idols for a day, clowns of the dramatized political posturing. A country whose mouth has been forced shut but whose vitality can still be seen in the cracks that pierce the indifference: an editor who dares to publish an imprudent book, a journalist who—remembering the nobility of his occupation—revolts and manages to dominate his inquisitors when he is dragged before a court of law. An old man who, ignoring the quiet of a comfortable retirement, begins his final battle to defend the honor of this forgotten country.

Lieutenant Schreiber’s France.