Anna (13 page)

“It would not have mattered if you had not come at all,” she told him. “I found an officer who was delightful. He offered to take me round Paris in his carriage.”

“You spoke to him?”

“Certainly, he came and asked if I was waiting for anyone. And I told him that you were so late that I despaired of ever seeing you. He had only left me a few seconds before you arrived.”

“So you sent him away! You
did
wait for me?”

“I saw you as you drove up. So I told him that it would have to be some other time. He has promised to be here at the same place to-morrow.”

“Anna!”

“But how can you wonder? I never see you. You are always working, or your mother is with us.”

They were lying in the shade in each other's arms now. He had been kissing her, and her hair had been tousled into disorder by his sleeve. The shadows of the leaves flickered across her face as they had done on the day in the orchard. For the instant, war seemed not to have been declared, and the way still to be open for the two lovers.

He was bending over her.

“My class is due to be posted to-morrow,” he said.

She smiled up at him, and then, clasping her arms around his neck, she drew his head down to hers.

“There was no officer, Charles,” she whispered. “There could never be anyone but you.”

She paused, playing with his hair, and then spoke again.

“And you can really get a civil licence?” she asked.

“I went to the Mairie again to-day,” Charles answered. “It is only because of the war that everything is so late. They told me definitely that it would be ready to-morrow.”

“But to-morrow you will be gone!”

He bent down and kissed her cheek.

“I have arranged that they will post it to me,” he told her. “Then as soon as it reaches me, I can get leave and shall come back and marry you. Now that war has been declared, I do not mind whether my father gives his permission or not. It no longer matters.”

Anna turned her face up to meet his.

“You are sure?” she asked. “I am so terrified.”

“There is nothing in the world can stop us now,” he said.

Then, because the sun was already slanting through the trees, he drew her to her feet.

“I shall remember this evening for ever.”

“And I, Charles.”

At the corner of the first street a crowd had collected. Outside a small shop, a watchmakers', two
agents
with their pistols drawn were standing. Inside the shop could be seen the outlines of other helmets and uniforms. As Anna and Charles drew near, they saw two people emerge, one an elderly man who stooped slightly, and the other a young girl, possibly his daughter. They were accompanied importantly by a robust figure, evidently a policeman in plain clothes. The
agents
closed in behind them and, swinging their long truncheons from their wrists to keep back the crowd, they led the old man and the girl to the black police cart that was waiting at the kerb. The door at the back of the police cart opened and closed again and the victims vanished. Behind, at the doorway of the shop, an
agent
was fastening a padlock across the door.

It was one of the crowd who enlightened them.

“Germans,” he said delightedly, pointing at the back of the receding cart. “They're rounding them up.”

Charles raised his eyebrows incredulously and smiled. Anna thought that she had never seen anyone less moved. But at the next corner he turned hurriedly and led her through the quiet back
streets, away from the crowds and the police carts and the
agents
with their drawn pistols.

They returned home, separately and alone; Anna with her tale of the beauties of the Sainte-Chapelle, Charles with his account of the endless waits and delays at the Ministries.

He was one of seven hundred; like convicts, they thronged the white courtyard, with the iron gate closed on them. Some of them were already in uniform; others, for whom the whole of their equipment was not yet ready, walked about the desolate gravel square in fashionable jackets and regimental trousers, or wore military blouses and their own striped trousers fastened under the instep with elastic. Here and there were soldiers complete in every detail for the line except for the fact that they were wearing patent-leather or suède-topped boots. Charles himself had everything but his
képi,
his bandolier, and his rifle.

Seen through the grille of the gate, the collection of male forms, some squatting on their heels in the last extremities of boredom, did not look the stuff of which a victorious army is made. They fell into rank with the raggedness of civilians, and they marched unevenly, as though the barrack square were full of invisible slopes and inclines. They were of all sizes and of all degrees of confidence. And the few who had been able to secure substitutes for their service in peace time were now as nervous as amateur actors suffering from stage fright. The one thing that the seven hundred of them had in common was their age. To a man they were all twenty-four and a half years old.

It was now their eleventh day at Orléans. In the dépôt everything still seemed secure enough. But the rumours which came seeping into the camp were already disquieting. There were stories of light columns of German cavalry which had broken the French lines and returned without apparently having met with any resistance. Un-authenticated as these reports were, they were nevertheless disturbing. The fact that German mobile columns
had
penetrated was somehow generally accepted. And the suggestion that the walls of France—the solid and impenetrable walls of fortresses and strong points—were neither so strong nor so solid nor so impenetrable as they had imagined, had a chilling, depressing quality about it. No one, moreover, had heard anything of the French cavalry's doing any penetrating on their own account.

It was also said—the news was known in Orléans on the morning of the 17th of August—that the French had already suffered their first military defeat. At Weissenburg, the story went, General Douay himself had been killed and his men, hopelessly outnumbered, had taken to their heels and were now sheltering somewhere in the neighbourhood of Woerth.

As at all moments of crisis, one man now emerged, a man on whom the entire hopes of a nation were immediately and naively pinned. He was General MacMahon. His command was augmented by another 33,000 men, and on him the future of France was held to depend. People who hitherto had scarcely known his name now hailed him as their national saviour.

By the time the news of MacMahon's appointment had been received in Orléans, he had, however, already been driven out of Woerth with his troops fleeing in disorder. But when the news came through, the reservists in Orléans were ready for their long, broken, and interminable journey to the front. It was on them, and not on MacMahon, that everything now depended.

The regiment moved out of barracks shortly after dawn. It was the hour when animal spirits are at their lowest; and every second man seemed still drunk with sleep. The preceding night had been a strenuous, noisy one. Naphtha flares were lit round the barrack square, and squads of sappers had been loading equipment on to limbers, committing the utmost extremities of noise as they had slung the metal-bound cases on to the carts. In the result, no one in the entire camp had got any sleep.

Charles took his own place, red-eyed, at the rear of the endless file that stretched in front of him into the morning, and began the long tramp to the station. He was scarcely awake himself, and took refuge in the fact that a marching man is more automaton than human being, more disciplined than alive.

The march to the station gradually woke him up. And the regimental band blaring encouragement at the head of the column set up a kind of substitute life within them all. Dispirited conscripts found themselves stepping out with a new vigour, and the rabble began to resemble an army. The thought of death troubled very few of them. They had the confidence that comes of numbers, and their accoutrement, which had at last arrived, glistened reassuringly. As they marched they presented the magnificent spectacle of men stepping into victory. They began to sing.

Then, when they reached the railway station, they were kept waiting there for nearly four hours.

By the time they moved off again a new mood of resignation had descended on them. They now recognised themselves as only an infinitesimal, insignificant unit—even the regiment itself was no more—in the vast moving machinery of war. And as such they supposed that it was only reasonable in military eyes that they should be shunted into sidings, halted at isolated, lonely signals while goods and cattle-trains rumbled unhurriedly past, left at stations to sleep on the platforms. Only reasonable, but indescribably depressing.

The journey ultimately became something permanent and unchanging in their lives. It was accepted by all of them as something that would last for ever—as though their days would be an unceasing succession of noise and joltings and the odour of forty men in one long truck, and bawdy songs, and gambling with outspread army overcoats for card-tables. They even forgot at times that there was a war waiting for them at the end of it.

And in the way in which an army can absorb even the very nature of the men who are serving in it, this entire collection of waiters, schoolmasters, shopwalkers, farm hands, pimps and clerks were now all soldiers. Civilian life seemed something remote and alien to them. Some of them, indeed, seemed actually grateful for the accident of war, which had destroyed the whole anxious pattern of their pasts.

To Charles, however, memories of the previous life still came piercingly. In the first few days, which had gradually lengthened into weeks, at Orléans, he had awaited every post with an excitement and anticipation that he had felt in his throat, and even in his stomach. Possibly, he had told himself, there would be a letter from Anna. Or perhaps the promised licence would arrive. And when at last a letter from Anna did reach him, it was already so old that it had a pathetic quality of its own. It served only to emphasize his isolation. The letter had been posted to the receiving dépôt in Paris and had reached Orléans a full fortnight after it had been written.
“I do not know where they are sending you, my darling,”
it ran, “
but I shall be thinking of you wherever you are. Write to me the moment you know where you are going, and I shall look at the place on the map every night; it is the nearest I shall be able to get to you. If you cannot get leave to come back to Paris to get married, I will come to you wherever you are. My darling, I love you so much. …”

He had taken the letter out of his pocket and read it so often that it was now folded and crumpled. But somehow it now seemed meaningless. To him, seated on the floor of the overcrowded horse-wagon, the idea of marrying had the flavour of something
at once abstract and irrelevant. He found himself saying, “After the war, after this chaos is over,
then
I will marry her.”

But the end of the war still seemed a very long way off.

The main cause of the interminable journey was that the men were being conducted to the northern frontier without trespassing on the inner railway system of Paris, where the congestion was already impossible. In the result, the train went zigzagging across the
départements,
like a counter in a game of snakes-and-ladders. It was not until, on the fourth day, when they found themselves at Nancy, that they realised that the object had miraculously been accomplished.

They were now in the very landscape of war. On the roads beside the railway other columns of marching men could be seen everywhere. The villages had been garrisoned. The nervous strained their ears as though anticipating the sound of an engagement.

The train did not proceed any farther, and the route march to battle now began. It was now common knowledge that it was Saarbrücken for which they were making. And the military authorities had ordained that the operations should be completed in two days. By the end of the second day, when they were still only somewhere on their way, the train which they had left seemed, in retrospect, a vehicle of unbelievable, almost civilian luxury. Men were now marching on feet so badly blistered that at night their socks had to be cut off their feet.

On the morning of the third day, however, when their goal was within easy sight, there came sudden and astonishing changes of plan. They had scarcely left Saargemund when a mounted dispatch rider, covered with the white dust of the roads and his horse lathered with sweat, dashed up like a figure from some earlier era of warfare, and the entire column was halted. A conference of the officers started and, after a body of cavalry had been assembled for reconnaissance and had begun to set off along the Saarbrücken road, these too were recalled, and the whole regiment was turned and ordered to retrace its steps.

Wild rumours immediately began to spring up. They gradually crystallised into something not unlike the truth. The Germans had broken through Saarbrücken, and the engagement that was to have checked them at Spicheren was already a disaster. The French army was even now in full retreat on Saargemund.

The marching men, weary as they were with two full days on the road, began to move with an urgent, despairing vigour. They had as little desire as their officers to be plunged into battle without
rest, without preparation, and with their own comrades retreating in something like disorder into the midst of them.

The baptism of Charles's class had proved a fiasco.

In Paris, the real news of the war was not easy to come by. The censorship suppressed all hints of the gravity of the situation. But the carefully-phrased sentences about withdrawals to prearranged positions deceived no one. The whole of Paris had a sick, uneasy feeling that somewhere something had gone wrong. One or two of the more important cogs seemed a bit shaky in their bearings. Politicians, and particularly the Court circle, became unpopular. Journalists assumed the importance of witch doctors, either having or being reputed to have secrets and glimpses that were denied to common men. And everyone comforted himself with the dream that the genius of MacMahon was preparing some kind of vast strategic trap into which the German hordes were brutishly and unthinkingly marching.