French and Germans, Germans and French by Richard Cobb

Author:Richard Cobb
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241351321
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

A humble man’s dream of attainable bliss on three counts, and with only the whisky left out: whisky, cigarettes, et petites pépées, as in the popular song of the mid-1950s. He had made the wrong choice, partly because being bodyguard to a leading collaborator had seemed rather more prestigious – and had been no doubt much better paid – than being a commercial traveller in beauty products. How was the poor man to have known? How could he have read into the future? In 1942, to a simpleton like Balavoine, the future would have seemed to reside in a certain conception of Europe, something much bigger than France, more powerful than the familiar Hexagone, and how much grander than peddling cosmetics, in a couple of fibre suitcases, from door to door. If only the two offers had not come up together! But there it was; and, having made the wrong choice, he had been awarded – at the very least – l’indignité nationale, the loss of his civic rights – not that he would have much missed them – and, worse, the virtual impossibility of landing a new job. A very thin wall, indeed, on the other side of which lay at least one decoration, probably the red ribbon, a carte de résistant, a job in a ministry, and, as he says, government typists galore, Chesterfields, Camels and Lucky Strikes. Balavoine, poor fellow, is a character in fiction, but the results of a mistaken choice could be illustrated, again and again, in the personal case histories of le menu fretin of collaborationism. In the ambience of 1944/45, little mercy would be shown towards those who, faced with two contrasting offers, had gone for the wrong one.

A somewhat similar case is quoted, sympathetically, by Jean Galtier-Boissière, in his post-Liberation journal. It is that of an anarchist schoolmaster and militant pacifist, Maurice Wullens, one of those craggy, homespun, bearded rural cranks so often thrown up on the more innocent shores of French – or British – pacifism: a Tolstoyan beard, china-blue eyes, reddish eyebrows and a pleated blue peasant smock. Wullens had been severely wounded during the First World War. As he lay bleeding on the ground, he had been confronted by a German soldier who, instead of finishing him off with a bayonet, had carefully dressed his wounds and checked the flow of blood, thereby, as Wullens saw it, saving his life twice over. He had concluded from this act of humanity that the Germans were decent and kindly people, and had devoted the interwar years to pacifist propaganda in a little-read journal called Les Humbles. Defeat and occupation did nothing to alter his views – he was still back with his merciful German of 1916, however archaic he might have become in a Reich dominated by Nazi fanatics – and he continued to preach the purest doctrine of pacifism and to remain faithful to his extreme left-wing commitment. Wullens, one feels, was one of those obstinate, rather tiresome village prophets,

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