The Collaborators

‘Pauli!’ she screamed, but her voice was already lost in the explosion of a stick of bombs only a couple of hundred metres ahead. And the blast from the next bowled her over back into the protecting ditch.

Then the screaming engines were fading once more.

‘Pauli! Pauli!’ she cried, eyes trying to pierce the brume of smoke and dust which enveloped the road, heart fearful of what she would see when she did.

‘Yes, maman,’ said the boy’s voice from behind her.

She turned. Her son, looking slightly surprised, was sitting in the corn field.

‘It flew me through the air, maman,’ he said in wonderment. ‘Like the man at the circus. Didn’t you see me?’

‘Oh Pauli, are you all right?’

For answer he rose and came to her. He appeared unscathed. The baby was crying again and the boy said gravely, ‘Let me hold her, maman.’

Janine passed the young girl over. Céci often reacted better to the soothing noises made by her brother than to her mother’s ministrations.

Turning once more to the road, Janine rose and took a couple of steps towards the car. And now the smoke cleared a little.

‘Oh Holy Jesus!’ she prayed or swore.

The bomb must have landed on the far side of the road. There was a small crater in the corn field and a couple of poplars were badly scarred and showed their bright green core, almost as obscene as torn flesh and pulsating blood.

Almost.

The businessman lay across the bonnet of his ruined car. His head was twisted round so that it stared backward over his shoulders, a feat of contortion made possible by the removal of a great wedge of flesh from his neck out of which blood fountained like water from a garden hose.

As she watched, the pressure diminished, the fountain faded, and the empty husk slid slowly to the ground.

‘Is he dead, maman?’ enquired Pauli.

‘Quickly, bring Céci. Get into the car!’ she shouted.

‘I think it’s broken,’ said the boy.

He was right. A fragment of metal had been driven straight through the engine. There was a strong smell of petrol. It was amazing the whole thing hadn’t gone up in flames.

‘Pauli, take the baby into the field!’

Opening the car door she began pulling cases and boxes on to the road. She doubted if the long procession of refugees would ever get moving again. If it did, it was clear her car was going to take no part in it.

She carried two suitcases into the corn field. As she returned a third time, there was a soft breathy noise like a baby’s wind and next moment the car was wrapped in flames.

Pauli said, ‘Are we going back home, maman?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said wearily. ‘Yes. I think so.’

‘Will papa be there?’

‘I don’t think so, Pauli. Not yet.’

If there’d been the faintest gleam of hope that Jean-Paul would return before the Germans, she could never have left. But the children’s safety had seemed imperative.

She looked at the burning car, the bomb craters, the dead businessman. So this was safety!

‘Maman, will the Germans have stopped butchering and looting now?’ asked the boy.

‘Pauli, save your breath for walking.’

And in common with many others who had found there is a despair beyond terror, she set off with her family back the way they had come.

3

Under the Arc de Triomphe, a cat warmed herself at the Eternal Flame. Then, deciding that the air on this fine June morning was now balmy enough to be enjoyed by a sensitive lady, she set off down the Champs-Élysées. She looked neither to left nor right. There was no need to. Sometimes she sat in the middle of the road and washed herself. Sometimes she wandered from one pavement to the other, hoping to find tasty scraps fallen beneath the café tables. But no one had eaten here for at least two days and the pavements were well scavenged. Finally, when she reached the Rond Point, she decided like a lady of breeding whose servants have deserted her that she’d better start fending for herself and bounded away among the chestnut trees where the beat of a bird’s wing was the first sign of life she’d seen since sunrise.

Christian Valois too was reduced to getting his own breakfast, in his family’s spacious apartment in Passy. Four days earlier the Government had packed its bags, personal and diplomatic, and made off to Bordeaux. With them had gone Valois’s parents, his young sister, and the maid-of-all work. Léon Valois was a member of the Chamber of Deputies and a fervent supporter of Pétain. By training a lawyer, he reckoned there weren’t many things, including wars, which couldn’t be negotiated to a satisfactory compromise. His son, though a civil servant in the Ministry of Finance, was a romantic. To him the move to Bordeaux was a cowardly flight. He refused to leave Paris. Neither his father’s arguments nor his mother’s hysterics could move him. Only his sister, Marie-Rose’s tears touched his heart, but couldn’t melt his resolve.

At work he got less attention. His superior, Marc du Prat, smiled wearily and said, ‘Try not to spill too much blood on my office carpet.’ Then, pausing only to remove the Corot sketch which was his badge of culture, he left.

For three days Christian Valois had conscientiously gone to work, even though he had nothing to do and no one for company. The Ministry occupied part of the great Palace of the Louvre. What was happening in the museum he did not know, but in his section overlooking the Rue de Rivoli, it was eerily quiet, both inside and out.

This morning, because he found himself very reluctant to go in at all, he had forced himself out of bed even earlier than usual. But when he arrived at the Louvre almost an hour before he was officially due, the thought of that silent dusty room revolted him and his feet took him with little resistance down towards the river.

He saw few signs of life. A car crossed an intersection some distance away. Two pedestrians on the other side of the street hugged the wall and looked down as they passed. A priest slipped furtively into St Germain-l’Auxerrois as though he had a secret assignation with God.

Then he was on the quay, looking at the endless, indifferent Seine.

Was he merely a posing fool? he asked himself moodily as he strolled along. Perhaps his father was right. With the army in flight or simply outflanked, the time for heroics was past. It was time for the negotiators to save what they could from the débâcle. Perhaps the Germans wouldn’t even bother to send their army into Paris. Perhaps in the ultimate act of scorn they would occupy the city with a busload of clerks!

At least I should feel at home then, he told himself bitterly.

He had crossed to the Île de la Cité. When he reached the Pont du Change, he headed for the Right Bank once more, half-resolved that he would waste no more time on this foolishness. If he truly wanted to be a hero he should have fled, not to Bordeaux, but to England or North Africa, and looked for a chance to fight instead of merely making gestures.

So rapt was he that his feet were walking in time with the noise before his mind acknowledged it. Once acknowledged, though, he recognized it at once, for he had heard it often, echoing in his dreams like thunder in a dark sky ever since the war had passed from threat to reality, and his imagination had not deceived him. It was the crash of marching feet, powerful and assured, striking sparks off the paving stones as if they made an electrical connection between the conquerors and the conquered. He stopped and leaned against the low parapet of the bridge, overcome by his own mental image.

Then suddenly he could see as well as hear them, and the reality was even more devastating. In columns of three they were striding into the Place du Châtelet, passing beneath the Colonne du Palmier whose gilded Victory seemed to spread her angelic wings wider and hold her triumphal wreaths higher in greeting to these new and mightier victors.

Now they were on the bridge and coming towards him, trio after trio of strong young men, their faces beneath their heavy helmets grave with victory. Past him they strode with never a sideways look. He turned to follow their progress, saw the leaders halt before the Palace of Justice, saw them turn to face it, saw the great gates swing open and the gendarme on duty stand aside as the first Germans entered.

Now once more it was essential he should be at his desk.

He walked as fast as he could without breaking into an undignified trot which might be mistaken for fear. By the time he reached the Louvre the Rue de Rivoli had come to life once more, but what a life! No colourful drift of oppers and tourists, but a rumbling, roaring procession of trucks and tanks and cars and motor-cycles; and above all, of marching men, an endless stream of grey, like ash-flaked lava flowing inexorably, all-consumingly, through the streets of Pompeii.

Seated at last at his desk, he realized his calf-muscles were shaking. He experienced the phenomenon distantly as though the trembling were external and did not have its source in his own physical core.

Minutes passed, perhaps an hour.

Suddenly, without hearing anything, he knew they were in the building. He’d grown used to its emptiness, its sense of sleeping space.