Living With the Boche

by ABBÉ ERNEST DIMNET

1

Two days after the Paris bombardment of June 3,1940,a French officer rang the bell of my apartment near Notre-Dame. “Do you know that your name is on a blacklist of the Germans?” “How do you know that?”

“The list was found at the German Consulate, rue Huysmans. You’re on it.”

I was not surprised. Two years before, that same Consulate had refused me a visa to go to Trèves. I was a writer and I was no friend of Germany. Whatever might be the reason, it would have been foolish to await stolidly the arrival of hostile troops which might be in possession of that blacklist. On June 8 I left for Avignon. The roads of France were crowded with the lamentable hordes driven out by the invasion.

The German tanks were swift. I had not been two days in Avignon before the enemy was reported in the vicinity of Lyons and the military situation became hopeless. On June 13, Havas published a semi-official statement which only thoughtlessness could fail to interpret. The next day Reynaud, trying to shift the responsibility for the defeat, made his not too honest appeal to America. Almost at once he resigned and Pétain took over, obviously to become the Hindenburg of France. What Frenchman can ever forget the quavering voice announcing the end? The end of the debacle, of course, but was it not the end of France also? The next day there was a Requiem for the dead of the war. France seemed to be lying in the catafalque draped in the tricolor. Many people wept.

The ruin of what every good Frenchman had lived for could not but cause a physical shock. In a few weeks I lost twelve pounds, to be followed in time by thirty-five more. Yet the defeat was no surprise. Anybody who had read, even superficially, the statistics contrasting the feverish German rearmament with the supineness of our own military preparation at the hands of irresponsible politicians or self-satisfied generals could entertain no foolish hopes. Arriving in America in October, 1939, for my annual lecture-tour, I had been astounded by the optimism of Francophile Americans. I expressed that feeling in a Ford Hall Forum lecture in Boston. Neither in Paris nor in London had there been a realization of the military inadequacy of our democracies. The future was dark. I saw the astonishment of my audience, already accustomed to the sleepiness of the phony war or obscurely sure that right must make might. A few months later the whole world was undeceived. Hitler was in control of half of Europe.

Of course, there was de Gaulle. To me, as to most Frenchmen, he was a mere name till I heard his unforgettable appeal to freedom and hope on June 18. Surely here was a man of whom it could be said that even ruin bore him fearless? But only retrospective certainty can now brag of having been lifted out of despair by that one voice. As soon as it was silent we were confronted again with the real situation — namely, the future of the world hanging on the precarious hope that Britain could be spared invasion. It was not till September that, seeing America calmly adding fifty units to the British Navy, I felt sure of the final issue and my morale was restored forever. As for the future of France, it depended on a man of eighty-four to whom six hundred despairing politicians had delegated the authority of the Senate and Chamber. It also depended on what the undivulged terms of the Armistice might leave us of our national life, and it depended on the good will of Germany.

The Wehrmacht was reported to be polite and the French press — instantly transformed by force into a German press written in French — was profuse in its belief in a Europe led, it is true, by Berlin, but which liberation from England and America was going to metamorphose into an Eden. Many people seeking comfort, as we all do in a catastrophe, persuaded themselves that this vision of a happier future was not entirely imaginary. Even pessimists, who would not admit it, did not reject the possibility that Germany, surfeited with conquest, might gradually soften, as Turkey and Austria had done in the past, as Britain had softened towards Ireland.

Meanwhile the old Marshal was issuing conservative decrees which nobody could blame in a period clamoring for order and restoration. The French may have forgotten it by now, because our memory is like the seashore, cleared today of what was washed on it yesterday, but they were far from regarding him as anything else than a soldier making the most of a bad case, and, soldier-like, inclined to deceive the enemy. It was only later that I, for one, began to think he was getting too accustomed to the attitude forced upon him by the situation, and slowly becoming a pro-German by pretending to be one. In the summer of 1940 there could be no such suspicion, and nobody was very much surprised to see the Marshal attacked, as early as July, by the German-inspired Paris-Soir, or to hear that “Pétain-filou” (Pétaincrook) was a current phrase in Germany.

In this comparatively still atmosphere I decided not to try to reach Spain to embark for America, and wrote to my lecture agent to cancel my autumn engagements. I did not feel like running away from home in a crisis like this. America would be too comfortable from the material standpoint, too uncomfortable at a time when France must be regarded as a quitter. No, Paris should be my choice. Surely (marvelous illusion!) Paris would never be starving. And what a chance there would be there to see history in the making! On the other hand, if I went to America, how unpleasant it would be later to have to listen to eyewitnesses! To Paris, then. I have never regretted my decision, even when, weakened and skeletonic, I did my work in a fireless room after a very inadequate breakfast. As soon as repatriation began, in August of 1940, I applied for priority.

2

MY FIRST contact with the Germans at the demarcation line was at Chalon. As we entered the station yard I saw the first feldgrau sentry and felt a protest of my whole being. But the station was teeming with green-gray uniforms. A German noncommissioned officer examined my papers. He was the only German soldier, out of many thousands, whom I can describe as charming. He was tall, elegant, polite, and smiling — perhaps an Austrian. He handed me back my papers with an almost apologetic wave of his hand, and winked at a bundle of newspapers — a strictly forbidden contraband —which lay behind my suitcase. Austrian! Surely an Austrian! A minute later another noncommissioned officer, fat and furious, rushed into the car with a hoarse “Platz! Platz! Macht platz!” as he pushed in a few more refugees.

The train did not go beyond Dijon. I slept there at a queer inn where I was welcomed with an ironical smile, for I was carrying a dearly beloved cat in his basket and a parakeet in a small cage. Next morning I saw Germanized Dijon, with its first queues, its German policemen, and its details of German infantry singing their four-syllable songs and every now and then changing to their robot goose-step. I also bought my first German-French weekly — La Gerbe — of the ignoble Alphonse de Chateaubriant, an odious acquisition.

The Paris train was packed. Next me sat a crosseyed German private who moved my compassion by squinting at my lunch basket while he only produced a bar of chocolate. He sullenly ate more than half my food, pointing every now and then to some big shellhole with the proud remark, “Stuka!” To my surprise he knew the names of our musicians, but he was a boor. When we reached the Gare de l’Est, he left without an adieu. The station was dark and full of bustling soldiers. Full also of German notices and of Achtungs followed by unintelligible German directions through the loud-speaker. I found a porter who only charged forty francs — instead of the hundred and fifty now current — and accompanied me home in the solid black night. But home seemed like a Paradise as I took down protective papers from favorite books or furniture.

Next morning was not so bright. Here I was in a German Paris, a kind of prisoner, in fact, and quite likely to be a prisoner in good earnest, for there was that blacklist. I sat down to think. The only thing was to foresee. I packed up a valise and wrote four letters which were to be sent to the likeliest people in case I was arrested. I had better say at once that I was lucky and nothing ever happened. Sometime in 1943 I unpacked the valise and was overjoyed to lay my hand on four bars of soap which no money could, by then, have procured. Through the four years I was only one of the millions who were hungry and cold, irritated and ironical, hopeful and disappointed, ever expectant optimists.

3

I LOOKED at Paris as if I had never seen it before. The French police were there as usual, but there were also German soldiers everywhere — many sailors with two black ribbons hanging from their caps, German posters, German sentry-boxes, German flags, big and arrogant, and, round the German-occupied buildings, white barriers, sometimes stone walls. The boulevards, the Avenue Foch, the Concorde, the Champs-Élysées, the neighborhood of the Arc de Triomphe, were entirely Germanized. The stores full of German customers, many of them civilian businessmen. Germanized also was the Métro, the only mode of transportation left. I noticed at once that people were curiously silent in the cars. It did not take me long to learn that silence in public places meant safety. Say boche or doryphore (the potato pest) above a whisper and you went to jail; eavesdropping, during the first two years, was constant.

The soldiers in the streets were well-behaved, with none of the arrogance one could see in Metz before 1918. They looked at nobody and nobody looked at them, or at the many German girls in pearl-gray uniforms whom Gavroche called the gray mice — a decent but plain lot. A poster recommending to the soldiers to Abstand halten from the civil population was indeed superfluous. In time, the Germans spoke of Paris as the eyeless city. During 1943 a good many German families were housed in the Cité-Universitaire, and one often saw German farmers sent in to take over farms in northern France or in Lorraine. They looked respectable, but Parisians regarded them as symbols of the future civilian invasion and loathed them more than they did soldiers.

A very short time after my arrival I saw in the He Saint-Louis a German supervising the looting of the sugar in the back yard of a big shop, and later I saw a wine cellar being plundered. Every now and then people standing in queues had to leave empty-handed because two Germans would commandeer every box of this or that in the shop, but that was seldom. Our knowledge of the fact that 80 per cent of all goods could be, and was, requisitioned was as purely notional as the knowledge that France paid a daily four hundred million for being occupied. You were hungry, that was all. Almost every evening I saw seven or eight wagons of meat disappearing in the Olida factory to be canned and sent to Germany, but habit made me indifferent to the sight.

In the same way when you had not had a drop of milk for fifteen months, or seen a single orange in three years, you forgot that there was either milk or oranges. On a few occasions I saw officers obviously playing at owning the town, and I can never forget a group I saw near the Opera House towards the end of 1943. It consisted of four boys of twelve or thirteen commanded by another boy a year or two older. The five carried the short dagger of the Army, but the little chief played ostentatiously with his weapon and surveyed the passers-by with studied arrogance. Reconversion of those Hitlerian youths will not be easy.

I personally was never annoyed. I drowned an old pistol I had when the threat of searching for arms was emphasized, and I had to use various devices to make my voluminous diary unintelligible to anybody but myself. Nothing worse than that.

I had had visions at times of some intelligent human German whom I should be sure to meet as he went out of Notre-Dame and with whom I could talk about European politics, but in all the four years I only saw four or five who might have filled the bill, and nothing happened. Three or four times I visited German bureaus on behalf of an American friend shy of such contacts. I always met with iciness and hauteur. Once I made up my mind to extract a little humanity from one of those civilians and asked with a smile did a German soldier who met in a wood another German soldier unknown to him address him as du. “I will not answer that” was the reply.

Only on one occasion, in March, 1941, did chance put me in touch with two important Germans in the house of a friend who, I knew, sometimes received such visits. One, a fatherly-looking sexagenarian, was nothing less than the Führer of the Banque de France; the other, a lean bilious man, was the Führer of some important Dutch bank. The latter spoke good English and absolutely perfect French. No sooner was I introduced than I made up my mind not to waste this chance by talking about the weather.

I asked with a pleasant smile, “What compromise do intelligent Germans envisage to put an end to this war?”

“ Compromise! Why, we are victorious everywhere and occupy half of Europe!”

“ Yes, but you have not invaded England and you must see that America is slowly but surely coming into the war.”

“ I know America. Americans may raise an army of 500,000 men, but they will never be able to bring it over.”

“ What of it? Europe cannot live without American credits and raw materials. I admit that you cannot be driven out by force, but necessity will drive you to the compromise.”

Instead of answering, the trilingual financier launched into a long lecture on Anglo-Saxon economic tyranny and on how it was the French, not the English, who were the real cousins of the Germans. Did I not know that our many quarrels had only been a family feud going on since Louis-le-Débonnaire? Did I not realize what Europe could be, led by a FrancoGerman combine, with Britain at long last excluded? He went on eloquently till I had to leave, politely refusing the polite offer of a lift in a magnificent car I had seen at the door.

Apart from a few collaborators, nobody I knew saw any more of the Germans than I did. An American lady, friend of a friend of mine, had entered on negotiations with a coal dealer for a ton or two of blackmarket coal. One morning the maid terrified this lady with the announcement that a German soldier was in the drawing room. But the German was only coming to say that the coal could not be delivered on the date agreed upon with the dealer. Another friend of mine was told that two tons of metal he expected for his factory could only leave Saint-Denis Station on an extra payment of five thousand francs. On inquiry he found himself in the presence of a German whom he threatened without waiting to be blackmailed by him. On the whole, it can be said that the French, in four years, learned next to nothing from the Germans, or the Germans from the French. No administrative or practical improvement was ever seen. The German bureaus were full of conflicts and confusion. Sometimes of bribery.

4

YET Germany — that is to say, some one of the innumerable bureaus which German organization prepares against any emergency— did its best to influence French opinion. The effort was so persistent that it became laughable. As I said earlier, the press of the whole country was Germanized overnight through the cravenness of newspapermen who now justly pay for their treason with their lives. Every morning, editors received from one Major Schmidtke a sheet telling them what they must omit or say, emphasize or gloss over. You might read four or five newspapers — they were all alike. I read every day in L’Oeuvre the editorial of Marcel Déat, once a brave soldier, now a miserable agent of the enemy; and, every week, I made clippings from La Gerbe and the much better written, Je Suis Partout. I was only saved from being enraged, as I read, by the deep contempt I felt for the renegades’ enjoyment of their own abasement.

The themes were simple and invariably the same. The force of Germany was irresistible and her victory was a certainty; nothing could militate against that fact, for it was a fact. Britain was, as usual, hoping that everybody else would fight her battles, and the French would show themselves gullible if they did not feel sure that Churchill would make peace “on their backs” — a constant slogan — and, of course, keep what he already held of the French Empire. America was in the hands of a mental defective. She had no military genius. She would talk endlessly about a D Day which would never come, for the Atlantic Wall must discourage even better soldiers than those she was improvising. The United States was torn by divisions, and war necessities were quickly forcing Socialism upon it. John L. Lewis and Charles A. Lindbergh were its protagonists. France was despised as a quitter by both London and Washington. The Allied aviation showed clearly how hated she was. Her economy was being scientifically ruined.

The usual conclusion was that only “Europe” — the United States of Europe organized by Germany — was the way to salvation and to a miraculous prosperity. Under it all ran the everlasting desire to see a French mobilization help the German armies. This, Déat and Doriot advocated openly.

Needless to say, the news was carefully censored. I should never have heard of Roosevelt’s last reelection had it not been for the London BBC.

There must have been a Poster Propaganda Bureau under some other Major Schmidtke, for every week, punctually, appeared an anti-British or anti-American poster ten or twelve feet high. The Germans showed little talent in this kind of propaganda. Too heavy. The Parisians, night after night, would cover the walls with V’s symbolizing their faith in Victory. The Germans hated this letter worse than anything else. Of those hundreds of posters, I can only recall one which had some salt in it. It pictured a snail crawling up the coast of Italy with an American flag on one horn and a British Union Jack on the other. The legend said, “It’s a long, long way to Rome.” Unfortunately, or fortunately, Rome was taken the very next week, and the poster got scribbled over with ironical comments before it was hastily torn off.

There was also an intensive propaganda by weekly lectures which I sometimes attended. I saw twice the ineffable Chateaubriant losing his way through his typed copy and unable to finish his sentence. People hissed. The only one of those lectures I can remember without disgust was given by the German writer Sieburg. Its conclusion, in a melancholy tone, was that “Europeanized” France would never again be a land of happiness. The man was sincere.

It is difficult for the bulk of a nation to be long submitted to intensive propaganda without being impressed by it. As the years went by, many people disbelieved the possibility of an Allied landing and inferred that the end must indeed be peace on the backs of us quitters. But this was probably one of the superficial beliefs which privations and disappointments will breed. For the double bombardment of the Renault Works at Billancourt — by the RAF in 1943, by an American air force in 1944 — was hailed with enthusiasm. I shall never forget a Billancourt barber beaming on the doorsill of his shattered shop as he described the destruction in the near-by factory. I saw the RAF in action that Sunday night. In spite of the danger, hundreds of people were watching the bombardment, as I did, from open windows, and all but clapped their delight.

Moreover, no amount of propaganda could neutralize the reaction which the Germans produced by the excesses of their Gestapo and by the wholesale execution of many thousand innocent hostages. Horror prevailed. Several of my friends — among them that rare Christian, Comte de Pange — were imprisoned; many more died in camps, none more respected than Irene Nemirovski, a young Jewish writer of brilliant talent and charming modesty.

The Gestapo, along with the mobilization of French workmen to release German soldiers, produced the great, the redeeming thing called the Maquis. I got wind of the rising of this movement by veiled allusions heard in daily conversations with French policemen, invariably fearless patriots. Gradually this movement was felt to be gaining in momentum. Secrecy was so complete that I never suspected that a young friend of mine, a former aviator, was one of its active agents. But the time came when I could hear John Palmer, for years my colleague on the London Saturday Review, night after night, passing on to the Maquis cryptic messages over the BBC, and when a rumor — which proved to be no exaggeration — said that one unknown captain had mustered a force of 32,000 in the mountains of Savoy. Even the German press had to report ubiquitous sabotaging of railroads or electric power by Maquisards. During the last months this went on almost openly. I once noticed, near one of the Paris gates, two low cupolas evidently intended for defense. A German officer was checking up the work with a blueprint in his hand. When he was gone I came near and said to the French foreman, “All this cement work seems terribly strong.” “Well, isn’t it?” the man answered with a chuckle.

Towards the end the daring of the Paris populace became unbelievable. I saw the rise in one morning of three or four of the six hundred barricades which Paris built out of the most improbable material, to trap the Germans in the very city they were still ruling. No amount of patrolling by heavily armed tanks disturbed them more than a few moments when the enemy came in sight.

I saw several encounters, my quarter being one of the hottest centers. The Germans did not show much fight. (They were also unexpectedly timid during bombardments.) General de Chambrun, shut up with a thousand of them in his American hospital, had no difficulty in persuading them to surrender to one French major after Maquis men had caused them thirty or forty casualties.

Finally the Day came, on the anniversary of which I am writing this. Early in the heavenly morning of that August 25, I opened a window and asked a man down in the street if there was any news. “Oh, yes!” the man said. “They are coming in. I have just seen two — two Frenchmen.”

Unforgettable minute! As I remember it, the four hideous years seem to have been nothing. Four years is a long time in an old life. But time should only be counted by its great moments.