Monsieur le Commandant by Romain Slocombe

it? My little nurse extricated herself from my embrace. ‘Come back soon,’ I begged, turning to whisper breathlessly, ‘Promise, Hermione?’ The child nodded; Ilse took her by the hand and climbed onto the train without responding. I watched the red tail lights of the train recede down the tracks until they vanished into the dark night.
    My son had left for the front in early September and had not yet been given leave for Paris. I calculated that my Jewish daughter-in-law had not enjoyed the carnal act in two months.

9.
    It is 8.30 a.m. Unable to sleep, I rose and began to write to you before dawn, and my wrist is numb from the work. The maid has just brought me my coffee. I have asked her not to disturb me before lunch.
    She is one of our sturdy peasant women from the Bocage, speaking with their typical slow drawl. Her husband works at the glassworks. Unbeknown to her, this decent woman was the inspiration for Marie-Thérèse in my
Monsieur de Saintonge
. I slept with girls of her type in my youth. I liked their candid laughter, their cheeks browned in the open air, their broad hips, their heavy, sweet-smelling breasts, their skilful hands and wrists, trained at work in our Norman dairies. I’ve sown quite a few bastards in the countryside; they are adults by now, most of them men, and out at work by this time of day. They rise at six, have their breakfast of soup, buttered bread and cider. In the summer, they work eleven hours in the fields without a break. My blood flows in their veins, and their sweat waters the soil.
    Before I finish this letter, Monsieur le Commandant, I will have to return to the subject of these boys – or rather, one of them in particular.
    God help me.

    As the Maréchal explained, the French will see all their strength restored, like the giant in the fable, when their feet are once again firmly planted in the soil. For the peasant is able to live on hope:
    In the fields, nothing can be taken for granted. Work in itself is not enough. One must still protect the fruitsof the earth from the fickleness of the weather: frost, flood, hail, drought. The city-dweller can live from day to day. The cultivator must predict, calculate, struggle. Disappointments have no hold on such a man, who is guided by an instinct for the necessary labour and a passion for the soil. Whatever may come, he faces it, holds firm, and masters it.
    France – a hardworking, thrifty and freedom-loving nation – was born of such everyday miracles. The peasant built her with his heroic patience. It is he who maintains her economic and spiritual equilibrium. The prodigious advances in our material strength have yet to tap the source of our moral strength, which is etched all the more indelibly on the heart of the peasant because he draws it from the very soil of the Homeland. 4
    The earth does not lie. It is our undying resource. It is the Homeland itself.
    In giving his attention to its destiny, the Maréchal sees, in its resurgence or its decline, the very reflection of our
national
destiny.

    Shortly after my little family had left, I received my first military postcard from Olivier, a scrap of blue cardboard sent from ‘Postal Sector No. 165’. The printed heading read: ‘This card must contain no indication of location, no description of military activity, and no name of a ranking officer.’ My son wrote neither about Ilse, nor about the child, nor about his own situation; he sent trite get-well wishes to his dear little mother; spoke – God knows why – about Napoleon; and signed off with the comical ‘Your sans-culotte’. At the hospice, I read the card to Marguerite, who nodded her head in silence, though Icould not be certain that she understood. As the weather was fine, the ward sister allowed me to take my wife for a walk in the wheelchair, bundled up in furs over her nightgown. We strolled along the river. As we approached Quai de Verdun, I worried that the sight of our outer wall, the gables, chimneys and