V for Vengeance (4 page)

The French Army was still falling back. The Government had retired, so it was said, first to Orléans, then to Tours. The Germans meanwhile proclaimed a fresh series of shattering blows, and their panzer columns were reported to be advancing almost without opposition through Châlons and Saint-Dizier towards Chaumont and the Plateau de Langres, thus cutting off the great garrisons in the Maginot Line from the Main French Armies of manœuvre.

Georges' funeral took place on the morning of the 15th, and on Madeleine's return from it her mother endeavoured to rouse her, but her hysterical outburst of weeping during the previous night had given place to a hard, unnatural calm, in which she spoke only when addressed and then in no more than monosyllables.

Had Georges' death occurred during normal times she would have had numerous friends to comfort her, and some of them would certainly have insisted on taking her away, at least for a time, from the actual scene of the tragedy; but two-thirds of the population of the capital had fled before the advancing Germans. The remainder still kept to their houses, temporarily overwhelmed with the catastrophe which had fallen so swiftly upon them; unable to make plans for the future and as yet too absorbed with their own anxieties to rouse themselves in
an effort to discover what had happened to their acquaintances.

Madeleine too was at present quite incapable of making any plans for the future. Her blue eyes seeming abnormally large from the unnatural pallor of her face, and dressed in the deepest mourning of unrelieved black, she moved mechanically about the small household tasks of tending her mother and cooking meals. There was no shortage of food so far, and in her few expeditions to the local shops she saw no evidence that the Germans were behaving with the brutality with which they were credited. The few that she saw appeared to be in a high good humour, either driving about in cars or strolling in small groups and pausing to look in the well-filled windows or to photograph buildings of historic interest, as nearly all of them carried cameras. Most of them were young, pink-faced and rather stupid-looking. They had more the appearance of sightseeing country-bumpkins than that of the brutal and licentious soldiery of a conquering army.

It was on the afternoon of the 16th that Madeleine was first roused into exchanging more than monosyllables with anybody. On coming upstairs with some things that she had bought for supper she ran into a young man on the landing who was just coming out of the apartment opposite her own. He was a tall, dark fellow, with brown spaniel-like eyes, a little hairline moustache and short side-whiskers, which gave him rather the appearance of a Spaniard.

As she reached the landing he looked awkwardly away from her and flushed with embarrassment. She sensed that he must have heard of her tragedy and was momentarily at a loss as to how to greet her; so she said at once:

‘Why, Pierre, what a nice surprise to see you! So many of ones' friends seem to have disappeared in these last terrible days.'

‘I know,' he murmured; ‘and for you things have been far worse than for most of us. Poor Georges—I cannot say how terribly sorry I am.'

‘Please—let's not talk of it,' she said quickly. ‘It's too near—too painful. But tell me about yourself.' As she spoke she unlocked her door, and he followed her inside.

He gave a rueful smile. ‘About myself there is not much
to tell. I was lucky to get back with a whole skin, and now I shall try to paint again. God knows if anyone will have the money to buy pictures, but I suppose we'll all manage to scrape along somehow.'

Pierre Ponsardin was an artist of some promise but few means; yet, after being called up, he had managed to continue to find the rent for the apartment on the other side of the landing, which served him both for home and studio, as when he had first taken it he had had a big window cut in the mansard roof, which gave the main room an excellent north light. He had known Madeleine for some time and had fallen in love with her, but when they had first met as neighbours she had already been engaged to Georges; so he had never had any opportunity of disclosing his passion. Madeleine's intuition had told her long ago that he had more than a friendly interest in her, but she had never betrayed the least sign of realising that; and as it was several months since she had last seen him his very existence had almost faded from her mind.

With Pierre, on the contrary, separation had even intensified his feelings about her. For such a sensitive and fastidious man life in the Army had proved a veritable hell. The coarse food, the discomfort, the dirt, the bullying of the N.C.O.s and the often brutal ragging of his fellow-soldiers had proved more soul-destroying to him than a prison sentence would have been to any habitual criminal. During these months of utter wretchedness one of his few consolations had been to gaze in secret upon a miniature that he had painted of Madeleine, which still hung by a ribbon round his neck under his shirt; and now that he saw her again in the flesh all his old passion for her welled up with renewed force.

Actually, he had hardly known Georges, so he had no great reason to be distressed about his death. In fact, when he had first heard of it he had, not altogether unnaturally, been forced to conceal his excitement at the new hope that it gave him now that Madeleine was free again; but he was much too good a psychologist to rush his fences and had no intention of showing his hand for the moment.

Instead, to take her thoughts off Georges and the vast tragedy which was engulfing France, he told her something of Army
life, but he was careful not to present it as he had found it himself, from fear that she might think him a milksop. He spoke with admiration of his officers and of what good fellows his brother privates had been. While feigning a certain modesty, he related one or two imaginary adventures in the firing-line before the Battle of France was opened, which put him in a good light, and said what fun they had had in the periods when his regiment had been relieved from active duty and they were able to hold concerts and sports. He had been talking for some time when a little frown crossed Madeleine's brow, and she suddenly asked:

‘How comes it, Pierre, that you are not with your regiment still?'

He shrugged. ‘What would you? You must have heard how our Generals let us down. We would have fought to a finish had we been allowed to do so; but all the time it was retreat—retreat—retreat. And two days ago it became obvious that the Generals did not mean us to fight at all.'

‘But—the main French Army is still fighting somewhere south of Paris,' she protested.

He shrugged again. ‘Perhaps, but the Army, of which my battalion formed a part, was in the north, near Amiens, and I doubt if we could ever have got back so far.'

‘You doubt it! But did you not try?'

‘Well—yes; but you have no idea of the confusion. The roads were choked with refugees. We were often hours late in reaching each fresh rendezvous. The orders we got contradicted one another, and so it at last became every small unit for itself.'

She stared at him: ‘Do you mean, Pierre, that you ran away?'

He laughed a little awkwardly. ‘Hardly that! But the German advance was so swift, and we never knew on which side of us we would find them next. It became obvious to all of us that without proper orders and with the Army already in a state of disintegration we could no longer hope to influence the course of events. It was the same everywhere, from what I hear, and I doubt if the Armies in the south will be able to hold out for more than a day or two longer.'

‘But they are fighting still, and you are not with them,' she
insisted. ‘You are here, in Paris, and in civilian clothes. Why?'

He fingered his small moustache. ‘Naturally it is difficult for you to understand, Madeleine, but have you realised what will happen to all men in uniform when the collapse comes?'

She shook her head.

‘They will be disarmed and herded into concentration camps. If we ask for an armistice the fighting will stop, but the fighting forces will not be released and allowed to go home until a formal peace is agreed; and that may not be for months. If our Government decides to go to North Africa and fight on it may not even be for years. The Germans are short of food themselves, so they won't have much to spare for their prisoners. Thousands of our soldiers will die from semi-starvation and the appalling conditions in those camps. Would you have had me surrender myself to such a fate when I had a chance to escape from it? Surely not?'

‘Georges' death may have made me hard,' she said slowly, ‘but I can't help feeling that it was your duty to remain with your regiment, at least until an armistice had been declared. Afterwards, it would have been another matter.'

‘Then it would probably have been too late to escape.'

‘Perhaps; yet you lay all the blame for our defeat upon the Generals. How could they be expected to turn the tide of the invasion if all France's soldiers had behaved as you have done?'

‘But many of them did,' he protested. ‘What was the sense of fighting on when anybody who was there could see for themselves that the High Command had broken down and the battle was already lost? We did our best, but when there was no more that we could do the men in my unit held a meeting, and we all decided that the sensible thing was to try to save ourselves. How the others fared I don't know, but in Beauvais I managed to buy a suit of overalls and get a place on the roof of the last train going through to Paris. I lay doggo in the suburbs for a couple of days, then walked in last night, and, personally, I think I'm darn' lucky to be here.'

Suddenly Madeleine stood up. ‘You are a coward and a deserter!' she shouted, banging the table with her small fist. ‘Get out! Get out!'

He came slowly to his feet, a look of pained surprise on his good-looking face. He would have given anything now to
have had the last ten minutes over again, so that he could have invented some plausible and praiseworthy reason for his having suddenly appeared again in Paris in civilian clothes. But in his own mind he had seen his conduct as not only logical, but rather commendable. After all, he had exercised considerable ingenuity in succeeding in getting away while the bulk of his fellow-soldiers must almost certainly be caught; but he realised now that he had made a hopeless mess of things, and he was so upset at the idea of having shamed himself so completely before the girl that he loved that he could only wave his elegant hands in a futile gesture and stammer:

‘But, Madeleine, you don't understand how things were.'

‘Get out!' she repeated between clenched teeth. ‘Get out! Before I hit you for the coward that you are!'

With a helpless little shrug and the dejected look of a beaten dog he lowered his brown eyes before her blazing blue ones and walked slowly from the room.

For some minutes after his departure Madeleine stood there, positively seething with indignation. So that was how France had fallen into this miserable plight. Instead of defending her, as they should have done, her soldiers had thought only of their own skins. Whole units, such as Pierre Ponsardin's, had just abandoned the fight once they had found themselves in difficulties and made off, each man as quickly as he could, for their homes.

After a little she calmed down, and realised that she had perhaps been rather unjust to Pierre. He was not a strong, courageous man like her dear Georges, but an artist with all an artist's hatred of fighting and violence. If the other men of his unit had run away there was certainly some excuse for him, but the whole sordid tale filled her with an incredible sadness, and she suddenly burst into a violent fit of sobbing.

When she recovered she felt better and realised that her talk with Pierre had done something to her. Before, she had been like a body without a spirit, but his cowardice had raised in her the first emotion of any kind which she had felt since Georges' death and her vow of vengeance beside his body. In some strange way she felt as though a spring inside herself had been released and that she had become quite normal again, so that she could take up once more the affairs of daily life.
That evening her mother noticed the change and, although she refrained from any comment, was much comforted by it.

On the following morning, June the 17th, the radio announced that everyone should listen-in at eleven o'clock, as Marshal Pétain would make an important announcement. At eleven Madeleine sat at her mother's bedside, and together they heard the voice of France's elderly hero, the one-time Victor of Verdum. He asked for calm and dignity among all the people of the French nation, whether they were in territory already occupied by the enemy or not. He spoke of France's great weakness through her fallen birthrate, which had made it impossible for her, after being deprived of the support of the Allied Armies in Flanders, to resist the invader.

He went on to say that, having fought an honourable fight with an honourable enemy, he had the previous night asked, as one soldier to another, of the German Commander-in-Chief that honourable terms should be given to France in order to avoid further, now useless, bloodshed.

When he had finished Madame Lavallière looked across at her daughter and said slowly: ‘So this is the end. A sad end for us, but at least the women of the world will be glad that the men have come to their senses and stopped killing one another.'

‘You are wrong,
maman.
This is not the end—only the beginning,' Madeleine replied swiftly.

‘What do you mean, child? The Marshal said that he had asked for honourable terms. That means an armistice. The “Cease Fire” will sound at once, and in a few weeks there will be peace, and that will be much, however hard the terms that the enemy impose on us.'

Madeleine shook her head. ‘But you don't understand. It is only the Army in France which is surrendering, not the whole French Empire.'

‘Are you sure of that?'

‘Of course. Georges said that the Army here might have to lay down its arms, but that the Government would go to North Africa and continue the struggle from there. Pierre said the same thing only yesterday.'