A Question of Loyalties by Allan Massie

Author:Allan Massie [Allan Massie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847674920
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 1989-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

These months were a kind of limbo for him. He went through the motions of being a serving officer with such diligence as he could muster. He was far too proud not to do his work efficiently, but he knew that he had made a mistake in insisting on returning to the Army. He couldn’t believe either that he might make a useful contribution to the war effort there, or indeed in the war effort itself. His diaries are full of doubts. Even the Colonel, whom he had admired at first, proved to be ‘obstinate and old-fashioned to the point of imbecility. It is like serving in the Royal Army of 1788.’

In February he went to Paris on leave. The atmosphere of the city astonished him. At first he told himself it was because he had forgotten the sound of conversation, which was unfair to young Alain. But it wasn’t that. It was rather that Parisians seemed to him to have become already indifferent to the war. It was a joke-war in which nothing was happening, and soon a peace would be agreed.

‘After all,’ a woman said to him, ‘it was only about Poland, wasn’t it, and now that Poland has been gobbled up by the Germans and the Bolsheviks, there seems little reason to continue to pretend that we have anything to fight about.’

She waved a cigarette-holder in his face, and he remembered from that gesture that she had been a friend always ready to encourage Polly in some frivolity.

When he met Marcel Pougier, he found him only able to speak of a young actor he had seen in a play.

‘What I’m terrified of is that he will be called up. It wouldn’t suit him at all.’

Lucien wondered how he had escaped call-up already.

He walked by the Seine. The hard frost held the sky motionless, blue-grey and shiny like a suit of armour. Birds huddled black on the black branches. Even the chestnut-sellers, round their braziers, stamped their feet to keep warm. The smell of the roasting chestnuts hung in the air. A hearse pulled by four black horses passed, its driver muffled to the ears. Sheets of ice had formed round the parapets of the bridges, supporting seabirds the colour of fog. Every now and then came an echoing creak as a barge broke through the ice. As night approached, the horns of the barges sounded melancholy as funeral music and the wretched tramps who slept under the bridges made their round of the dustbins collecting scraps of food and discarded newspapers with which to cover themselves.

But in the brasseries and cafés things were different. In the first weeks of the war, when he was last in Paris, many had been closed. Now their proprietors had accommodated themselves to the blackout. In the evening, tarts, assembling at street corners, swung gasmasks in their hands. There was a note of gaiety there once you were past the misted glass doors. Inside the babble of conversation rose: ‘like incense’ he said to himself.

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