The highways too were part of our experience. We were pilots, and there were days when in a single morning our sortie took us over Alsace, Belgium, Holland, and the sea itself. But our problems were most often of the north of France, and our horizon was very often limited to the dimensions of a traffic tangle at a crossroads. Thus, only three days earlier, I had seen the village in which we were billeted go to pieces. I do not expect ever to be free of that clinging, viscous memory.
It was six in the morning, and Dutertre and I, coming out of our billet, found ourselves in the midst of chaos. All the stables, all the sheds, all the barns and garages had vomited into the narrow streets a most extraordinary collection of contrivances. There were new motorcars, and there were ancient farm carts that for half a century had stood untouched under layers of dust. There were hay wains and lorries, carryalls and tumbrils. Had we seen a mail-coach in this maze it would not have astonished us. Every box on wheels had been dug up and was now laden with the treasures of the home. From door to vehicle, wrapped in bedsheets sagging with hernias, the treasures were being piled in.
Together, these treasures had made up that greater treasure--a home. By itself, each was valueless; yet they were the objects of a private religion, a family's worship. Each filling its place, they had been made indispensable by habit and beautiful by memory, had been lent price by the sort of fatherland which, together, they constituted. But those who owned them thought each precious in itself and for itself. These treasures had been wrenched from their fireside, their table, their wall; and now that they were heaped up in disorder, they showed themselves to be the worn and torn stock of a junk-shop that they were. Fling sacred relics into a heap, and they can turn your stomach.
"What's going on here? Are you mad?"
The cafe owner's wife shrugged her shoulders.
"We're evacuating."
"But why, in God's name!"
"Nobody knows. Mayor's orders."
She was too busy to talk, and vanished up her staircase. Dutertre and I stood in the doorway and looked on. Every motorcar, every lorry, every cart and charabanc was piled high with children, mattresses, kitchen utensils.
Of all these objects the most pitiful were the old motorcars. A horse standing upright in the shafts of a farm-cart gives off a sensation of solidity. A horse does not call for spare parts. A farm-cart can be put into shape with three nails. But all these vestiges of the mechanical age! This assemblage of pistons, valves, magnetos, and gear-wheels! How long would it run before it broke down?
"Please, Captain. Could you give me a hand?"
"Of course. What is it?"
"I want to get my car out of the garage."
I looked at the woman in amazement.
"Are you sure you know how to drive?"
"Oh, it will be all right. The road is so jammed, it won't be hard."
There was herself, and her sister-in-law, and their children--seven children in all.
That road easy to drive? A road over which you made two or ten miles a day, stopping dead every two hundred yards? Braking, stopping, shifting gears, changing from low to second and back again every fifty yards in the confusion of an inextricable jam. Easy driving? The woman would break down before she had gone half a mile! And gas! And oil! And water, which she was sure to forget!
"Better watch your water. Your radiator is leaking like a sieve."
"Well, it's not a new car."
"You'll be on the road a week, you know. How are you going to make it?"
"I don't know."
She won't have gone three miles before running into half a dozen cars, stripping her gears, and blowing out her tires. Then she and her sister-in-law and the seven children will start to cry. And she and her sister-in-law and the seven children, faced by problems out of their ken, will give up. They will abandon the car, sit down by the side of the road, and wait for the coming of a shepherd.
But it is astonishing how few shepherds there are. Dutertre and I are staring at sheep who have taken things into their own hands. And these sheep are off in an immense clatter of mechanical equipment. Three thousand pistons. Six thousand valves. The grate, the grind, the clank of this machinery. Water boiling up in a radiator already. And slowly, laboriously, this caravan of doom stirs into movement. This caravan without spare parts, without tires, without gasoline, without a mechanic. They are mad!
"Why don't you stay home?"
"God knows, we'd rather stay."
"Then why do you leave?"
"They said we had to."
"Who said so?"
"The mayor."
Always the mayor.
"Of course we'd all rather stay home."
It is a fact that these people are not panicky; they are people doing a blind chore. Dutertre and I tried to shake some of them out of it.
"Look here, why don't you unload and put that stuff back into your house. At least you'll have your pump-water to drink."
"Of course that would be the best thing."
"But you are free to do it. Why don't you?"
Dutertre and I are winning. A cluster of villagers has collected round us. They listen to us. They nod their heads approvingly.
"He's right, he is, the captain."
Others come to our support. A roadmender, converted, is hotter about it than I am.
"Always said so. Get out on that road and there's nothing but asphalt to eat."
They argue. They agree. They will stay. Some go off to preach to others. And they come back discouraged.
"Won't do. Have to go."
"Why?"
"Baker's already left. Who will bake our bread?"
The village has already broken down. At one point or another it has burst; and through that hole its contents are running out. Hopeless.
Dutertre said what he thought about it: "The tragedy is that men have been taught that war is an abnormal condition. In the past they would have stayed home. War and life were the same thing."
The cafe owner came down, dragging a sack.
"You can let us have a cup of coffee, I suppose. We are flying in half an hour."
"Ah, my poor lads!"
She wiped her eyes. It was not us she was weeping for. Nor herself. Already she was crying with exhaustion. Already she felt herself suffocating in that caravan which was to go further to pieces with every mile of its journey.
Farther on, in the open country, the enemy fighters would be flying low and spitting forth their bursts of machine-gun fire upon this lamentable flock. But it was astonishing how on the whole the enemy refrained from total annihilation. Here and there stood a car in flames, but very few. And there were few dead. Death was a sort of luxury, something like a bit of advice. It was the nip in the hock by which the shepherd dog hurried the flock along. Though one wondered why the enemy action was so little insistent, so altogether sporadic and local. The enemy was at no pains whatever to blow the caravan to bits. True, the caravan had no need of the enemy to go to pieces. The machines took care of that. They went spontaneously out of order. The machine is conceived for a deliberate and peaceful society, a society master of its time. When man is not present to repair the machine, regulate it, polish it, it ages at a dizzying pace. Tonight all these machines will look a thousand years old. I seemed to be looking on at the death-throes of the machine.
Here is a peasant whipping up his horse. Perched on his seat with the majesty of a king, he lords it over the whole caravan.
"You look very satisfied up there."
"Ah, it's the end of the world."
Suddenly I felt queasy. All these workers, these simple people, each with his place in the world, were to be transformed into parasites, vermin. They were going to spread over the countryside and devour it. The thought made me sick.
"Who is going to feed you?"
"Nobody knows."
How is one to feed millions of migrants shuffling over miles of road at the rate of two to ten miles a day? If food existed, it could not be brought up to the
m.
All this muddle of men and old iron lost on the asphalt of the highways made me think suddenly of my march through the Libyan desert. Prevot and I had crashed in a landscape glassy with black rocks and covered with a carpet of sun-grilled iron. This was not far different.
I stared at the refugees in despair. How long would a swarm of locusts last in a field of asphalt?
"Do you expect to drink rain-water?"
"Nobody knows."
They knew nothing. For ten days they had seen an unbroken stream of refugees from the north flow through their village. For ten days they had watched this unending exodus. And their turn had come. They would take their place in the procession. But without confidence: "If it was up to me, I'd rather die at home."
"We'd all rather die at home."
That was true. Their village might have collapsed over their heads, and still none would have chosen to leave.
Had France possessed reserves of food, that food could never have been brought up the highways down which this stream was flowing. If you have to, you can force your way downstream through brokendown cars, jammed cars, inextricable snarls of traffic at successive crossroads. But how can you move against such a stream?
"There being no reserves of food," said Dutertre grimly, "all is well."
A rumor is spreading that the Government has forbidden all evacuations. Even if it were true, how were the orders to be transmitted? There are no open roads, and the telephone cables are jammed, or cut; or the messages are received with a distrust born of experience. And it is no longer a matter of giving orders. What is wanted is the invention of a new code. For a thousand years man has been taught that women and children are to be shielded from war. War is a matter for men only. The village mayors are full of this law of society; their clerks know it; the schoolteachers know it. Assume that suddenly they receive orders to stop the evacuations, which is to say, force women and children to remain in the zone of bombardment. It will take them a month to adjust their conscience to this sign of a new age. You cannot overthrow a system of morality at one blow. And while you examine your conscience, the enemy continues his advance. Wherefore the mayors, their clerks, the schoolteachers send forth this stream of people on the highways. What is to be done? Where does truth reside? Forward troop the sheep without shepherd.
"Is there a doctor in this village?"
"You don't live here, I take it?"
"No. We live up north."
"What do you want of a doctor?"
"My wife is going to have a baby."
Lying among her kitchen utensils, in this desert of old iron.
"Couldn't you have thought of a doctor earlier?"
"We've been four days on the road."
The road is an irresistible stream. Where can you stop? Every village you move through is deserted the moment you arrive, pours into the caravan like the flow of a burst pipe into a giant sewer.
"No. No doctor here. The Group doctor is ten miles up the line."
"Well. Thank you."
The man mopped his forehead. Everything was going to pieces. His wife would bring her child into the world in a bed of kitchen utensils. There was nothing cruel about this. It was above all, most of all, monstrously beyond the bounds of things human. Nobody complained. Complaint was meaningless. His wife would die, and he would not complain. His wife was to die in childbed. Complain of what? There was no help for it. It was a nightmare.
"If we could only stop somewhere!"
Find a real village, a real inn, a real hospital. But, for God knows what reason, the hospitals too are being evacuated. It is part of the game. There isn't time to recast the rules of the game. Find a real death. But there is no real death any longer. There are bodies that break down the way the cars do.
Everywhere in this mob I sense a wearied haste, a haste that has renounced haste. At the rate of two to ten miles a day these people are fleeing before tanks moving at fifty miles a day and aeroplanes flying at four hundred miles an hour. Thus treacle flows when the bottle has been overturned. This man's wife would lie in; but he had all the time in the world before him. It was urgent. Was it really urgent? It was suspended in unstable equilibrium between urgency and eternity.
The world of these people had slowed down, like the reflexes of a dying man. This was an enormous flock that stood, exhausted and shuffling, at the gates of a slaughter-house. Were there ten or only five million of them on the asphalt? Here was a people accepting the notion of its reabsorption into eternity.
"How," I said to myself, "are these people to survive? Man does not eat branches." But they themselves were not in the least horrified by their fate. Wrenched from their homes, their work, their responsibilities, they had lost all significance. Their very identity seemed to have been rubbed off. They were very little themselves. They were very little alive. Later, they would re-invent their sufferings. Meanwhile they were suffering most of all from the aching strain of heavy loads, from the loosened knots in bedsheets that dripped with their dreary entrails, from the strain of pushing motorcars forward in the attempt to make the engines turn over.
Not a word about defeat. Naturally. No man feels the need of discussing a thing which constitutes his very substance. They were the defeat. I had suddenly the vision of a France losing its entrails. Quick! Sew up our France! There is not a moment to lose! France is doomed.
It began again. Like fish on dry land, these people were suffocating: "Anybody got any milk here?"
A question to make you die laughing.
"My kid hasn't drunk anything since yesterday."
The kid was a six-months-old baby. He made a lot of noise. But his noise wouldn't last. Fish out of water are soon quiet. There is no milk here. There is only scrap-iron here. There is only an enormous quantity of useless scrap-iron, falling apart mile after mile, dropping bolts, nuts, screws, sheets, while it bears this prodigiously needless exodus, this people, away towards oblivion.
A rumor spreads that some miles to the south the road is being machine-gunned by the enemy. There is talk of bombs. There is even the muffled sound of distant explosions. The rumor is no mere rumor.
But these people are not frightened. They seem even to perk up a little at the news. That concrete risk seems to them healthier than this drowning in old iron.
Ah, the blueprint that historians will draft of all this! The angles they will plot to lend shape to this mess! They will take the word of a cabinet minister, the decision of a general, the discussion of a committee, and out of that parade of ghosts they will build historic conversations in which they will discern farsighted views and weighty responsibilities. They will invent agreements, resistances, attitudinous pleas, cowardices. But I know what an evacuated ministry can be. I've seen one. It taught me that once a government evacuates, it is no longer a government. It is like a human body. If you begin to take it apart, sending the stomach here, the liver there, the guts somewhere else, that collection no longer constitutes an organism. I spent twenty minutes at the Air Ministry. And I can tell you that in rime of evacuation a minister is a being who controls the movements of his messenger. Miraculous control. He has only to press a button. An electric cord still joins the flunkey to the minister. The minister presses the button and the flunkey appears.
"My car," says the minister.
And there his authority stops. He gives his flunkey a little exercise. But the flunkey is not sure if, on earth, there exists a car that is the minister's. No electric cord runs between the flunkey and anything at all. The chauffeur is lost somewhere, out in the world. What could the men who governed us know of the war? Situated as we were, impossible as liaison now was, it would take our people a week to arrange for the bombardment of an enemy division spotted by my Group. What sound could reach the ears of our governors from this land that was losing its entrails? News moved at the rate of ten miles a day. The telephone service was out. There was no way of transmitting a picture of this being, this France, in a state of decomposition. The Government
swam in a void, a polar void. From time to time it was reached by desperately urgent appeals; but they were abstract, reduced to three scrawled lines. How could those who governed us know whether ten million Frenchmen had or had not already died of hunger? And this cry for help from ten million men could have been contained in a single sentence. It wants but a single sentence to say: "Meet you tomorrow at four."
Or:
"They say ten million men are dead."
Or:
"Blois is in flames."
Or:
"They've found your chauffeur."
All this on the same level of importance. Just like that. Ten million men. The motorcar. The Army of the East. Western civilization. The chauffeur has been found. England. Bread. What time is it?
I give you seven letters. They are the seven letters of the Bible. Reproduce the Bible with them for me.
Historians will forget reality. They will invent thinking men, joined by mysterious fibers to an intelligible universe, possessed of sound farsighted views and pondering grave decisions according to the purest laws of Cartesian logic. There will be powers of good and powers of evil. Heroes and traitors. But treason implies responsibility for something, control over something, influence upon something, knowledge of something. Treason in our time is a proof of genius. Why, I want to know, are not traitors decorated?
XIV
Already as I move in the direction of Arras, peace is everywhere beginning to take shape. Not that well-defined peace which, like a new period in history, follows upon a war decorously terminated by a treaty. This is a nameless peace that stands for the end of everything. For an end of things that go on endlessly ending. It is an impulse that little by little finds itself bogged down. There is no feeling that either a good or a bad conclusion is on the way. Quite the contrary. Little by little the notion that this putrefaction is provisional gives way to the feeling that it may be eternal. Nothing here is conclusive for there is no grip by which this great creature can be seized as you might seize a drowning man by knotting your fist in his hair. Everything has gone to pieces, and not even the most pathetic striving can bring up more than an insufficient lock of hair. The peace that is on its way is not the fruit of a decision reached by man. It spreads apace like a gray leprosy.