The World at Night

A COUNTRY AT WAR

The column came into the village of St.-Remy, where the D 34 wandered through plowed fields of black earth that ran to the horizon, to the fierce blue sky. The mayor waited in front of the boulangerie, his sash of office worn from waist to shoulder over an ancient suit. A serious man with a comic face—walrus mustache, pouchy eyes—he waved a little tricolor flag at the column as it passed. It took two hours, but the mayor never stopped. All along the village street, from the Norman church to the Mairie with geraniums in planter boxes, the people stood and cheered—“Vive la France!” The war veterans and the old ladies in black and the kids in shorts and the sweet girls.

A unit of the Section Cinématographique, attached to the Forty-fifth Division headquarters company, headed north in the column of tanks, gasoline trucks, and staff cars. The unit, assigned to take war footage for newsreels, included the producer Jean Casson—now Corporal Casson, in a khaki uniform—a camera operator named Meneval, like Casson recalled to service, and a commander, a career officer called Captain Degrave. They were supposed to have a director, Pierre Pinot, but he had reported to the divisional office at Vincennes, then disappeared; averse to war, the Wehrmacht, or the producer—Casson suspected it was the latter. The unit had a boxy Peugeot 401 painted army green, and an open truck, loaded with 55-gallon drums of gasoline, 35-millimeter film stock in cans, and two Contin-Souza cameras, protected from the weather by a canvas top stretched over the truck’s wooden framework.

The village of St.-Remy disappeared around a bend, the road ran for a time by the river Ourcq. It was a slow, gentle river, the water held the reflections of clouds and the willows and poplars that lined the banks. To make way for the column a car had been driven off the road and parked under the trees. It was a large, black touring car, polished to a perfect luster. A chauffeur stood by the open door and watched the tanks rumbling past. Casson could just make out a face in the window by the backseat; pink, with white hair, perhaps rather on in years. The column was long, and probably the touring car had been there for some time, its silver grille pointed south, away from the war.

Casson had hoped, in the taxi on the way to the fortress at Vincennes, that it was all a magnificent farce—the work of the French bureaucracy at the height of its powers. But it wasn’t that way at all and in his heart he knew it. At the divisional headquarters, a long line of forty-year-old men. The major in charge had been stern, but not unkind. He’d produced Casson’s army dossier, tied in khaki ribbon, his name lettered in capitals across the cover. “You will leave for the front in the morning, Corporal,” he’d said, “but you may contact whoever you like and let them know that you’ve been returned to active duty.”

From a pay phone on the wall of the barracks he’d called Gabriella and told her what had happened. She asked what she could do. Call Marie-Claire, he said, keep the office open as long as possible, explain to the bank. Yes, she said, she understood. There was nothing but composure in her voice, yet Casson somehow knew there were tears on her face. He wondered, for a moment, if she were in love with him. Well, he hoped not. There was nothing to be done about it in any event, the life he’d made was gone. Too bad, but that was the way of the world. Over, and done. Part of him thought well, good.

“Perhaps,” she’d said, “there are certain telephone numbers you should have, monsieur. Or I could call, on your behalf.”

Gabriella, he thought. I never appreciated you until it was too late. “No,” he said. “Thank you for thinking of it, but no.”

She wished him luck, voice only just under control, soft at the edges. All during the conversation Meneval, the cameraman, was talking to his wife on the next phone. Trying to calm her, saying that a cat who’d run away would surely return. But, Casson thought, it wasn’t really about the cat.

Gabriella had approached the subject of phone calls with some delicacy, but she knew exactly what she was talking about. She knew he belonged to a certain level of society, and what that meant. That X would call Y, that Y would have a word with Z—that Casson would suddenly find himself with an office and a secretary and a job with an important title—honor preserved, and no need to die in the mud.

The column left Vincennes at dawn on the twelfth of May, a Sunday. Captain Degrave and Meneval in the Peugeot, Casson assigned to drive the truck—once again, somebody had disappeared.

At first he had all he could handle. The truck was heavy, with five forward gears, the clutch stiff, the gearshift cranky and difficult. You didn’t, he learned quickly, shift and go around a corner at once. You shifted—ka, blam—then slowly forced the truck around the corner. It was hard work, but once he caught on to that, to approach it as labor, he started to do it reasonably well.

Strange to see Paris through the window of a truck. Gray, empty streets. Sprinkle of rain. Salute from a cop, shaken fist from a street cleaner—give the bastards one for me. A toothless old lady, staggering up the embankment after a night’s sleep under a bridge, blew him a kiss. I was pretty, once upon a time, and I fucked soldier boys just like you. Up ahead, the commander of a tank—its name, Loulou, stenciled on the turret—waved a gloved hand from the open hatch.

They moved north, no more than twenty miles an hour because of the tanks, through the eastern districts of Paris. Nobody Casson knew came here—indeed there were people who claimed they lived an entire life and never left the 16th Arrondissement, except to go to the country in August. Here it was poor and shabby, not like Montparnasse; it had no communists or whores or artists, just working people who never got much money for their work. But the real Parisians, like Casson, made the whole city their home. The column crossed the rue Lagny, at boulevard d’Avout. Rue Lagny? My God, he thought, the Veau d’Or! Poor and shabby, yes, but there was always a way to spend a few hundred francs if you knew your way around. The vin de carafe was Brouilly, old Brouilly, from some lost barrel, almost black. And the Bresse chicken was hand-fed on the owner’s mistress’s mother’s farm.

Strange how life turns, Casson thought. He suddenly felt the ecstasy of the unbound heart. Going to Belgium, to the war. Well then, he’d go. He’d never used the word patriot, but he loved this whore of a France, its narrow lanes, dark and twisted, where you smelled the bread and smelled the piss and bored women leaned on the windowsills— want a ride? The engine of the truck whined, Casson tried a lower gear. But now it grumbled, skipped a heartbeat or two, so he shifted back to the whine.

Rheims.

Again the crowds, and everywhere the tricolor. The women hung garlands on the tanks’ cannon and handed the crews armloads of flowers, cigarettes, candy. Casson had a long pull from a bottle of champagne handed through the window and a wet kiss from a girl who jumped on his running board. A priest stood on the steps of Rheims cathedral and held up a crucifix, blessing the tanks as they rumbled past.

A few blocks ahead, the Peugeot was pulled over and Degrave waved at him to stop. “We’ll want this,” he said. Casson and Meneval loaded one of the cameras, set it up on a tripod on the back of the truck. Degrave took over the driving, Casson worked as the director. They circled around through the backstreets, rejoined the column, filmed the women kissing the tank crews and waving the tricolor. Of the priest, a close-up. Casson banged on the roof of the cab and Degrave stopped. A very French priest—rosy skin, fine hair, a certain refinement in the set of the lips. He held the crucifix with passion. They’d shut up in the boulevard movie theatres when they saw this, Casson thought. It was all well and good to screw the boss and hustle the girls, but they’d all made first communion, and they would all send for the priest when the time came. Cut to the faces of the tank commanders as their machines clanked past. Serious, courageous, going to war. Then a fourteen-year-old girl, tears in her eyes as she ran alongside a tank and handed up a branch of white lilac.

The column left the city on the RN 51. By the side of the road, the stone markers said SEDAN–86. Eighty-six kilometers, Casson thought. From here, you could drive to the border in an hour.

The crowd beside the road through Rethel was nothing like the one in Rheims. This crowd was watchful, and silent, and there were no garlands for the tank guns. After that, the villages were empty. There was no mayor, nobody waving, nobody. They had locked their houses and gone away. When Casson turned off the engine, he could hear the distant rumble of artillery.

On the Route Nationale there were refugees who had come south from Belgium. It looked the same, Casson thought, as the newsreels he’d seen of Poland in September of 1939. Exactly the same. To the question what should be taken? every family had its own answer—the bed, the painting, the clock. But then, days later, it didn’t matter. Exhaustion came, the treasures were too heavy, and into the fields they went.

Rough faces. Flemish, reddened, coarse to French eyes—the thick-handed cousins from the north, pikemen of a hundred armies in wars that lasted a century. The column slowed, then stopped. A nun came to Casson’s truck and asked for water. He gave her what he had, she took it away, shared it out among the refugees sitting by the roadside, then brought back the empty bottle. “God bless you, monsieur,” she said to him.

“Where are you from, sister?”

“The village of Egheze.” Then she leaned closer and whispered, “They burned the abbey to the ground,” her voice shaking with anger while she held his arm in a steel grip. Then she said, “Thank you for your kindness,” and walked away, back to the people by the side of the road.

The column stopped at dusk. From the Ardennes forest, up on the Belgian border, the guns thundered and echoed. The tank crews sat on a stone wall, smoked cigarettes, and drank wine from a brown bottle. There was a reservist with them, a man with a double chin and a hopeful smile. For a long time nobody spoke, they just listened to the artillery. “Well,” the man said, “it seems the Boche have come a long way south.” The tank crewmen grinned and exchanged glances. “He’s worried we won’t win,” one of them said. They all laughed at that. “Well,” said another, “one never knows.” That was even funnier.

After a moment the first one said, “Ah, my little patapouf .” Fatty, he’d called him, but gently, with the tenderness that very hard people sometimes show very soft people. “You have a day or two left to live,” he said. “You better take a little more of this.” He handed over the bottle. The man drank, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand and made an appreciative face to show how good the wine was.

A dispatch rider on a motorcycle picked up the day’s film. Then Casson followed the Peugeot on a steep, narrow road that wound down to the banks of a river. A series of tight curves—it took Casson four moves to maneuver the truck through the final hairpin.

He turned off the ignition, then sat still for a long time. A tiny village, completely deserted, the people fled or sent away. A silent, cobbled street; on one side the river, on the other a few old buildings, crumbling, leaning together, ivy and wild geranium growing up the stone corners and over the tops of the doorways. In the silver moonlight the water and the stone were the same color. A low hill rose above the tile roofs to a wall masked by shrubbery, then Lombardy poplars rustled in the breeze. Then the stars.

Captain Degrave walked over from the Peugeot and appeared at the window of the truck. “There’s a hotel up the street,” he said. “The Hotel Panorama. We were supposed to billet there, but the colonial troops have it.”

Casson had seen them on the road earlier that day; Algerian infantry and Vietnamese machine-gun squads. “I can sleep in the truck,” he said.

“Yes,” Degrave said. “You might as well.”

Casson lay across the seat, listening to the river—the wash of the water moving along the stone embankment—and the cicadas. He turned on his side and fell asleep.

He had a powerful dream, a dream of lost love found again. His heart swelled with happiness. The woman sat across from him—their knees almost touched—and spoke in whispers, as though people were nearby and could hear them.

“That was love,” she explained. “We were in love.”

He agreed, nodded, their eyes met, they longed to hold each other but it was a public place. “We can’t let it go again,” she said.

“No.”

“We can’t.”

He shook his head. If they let it go again it would be gone forever.

He woke up. The guns had stopped, there was just the river and the insects, loud on a summer night.

They worked hard the next day. Degrave started out just as the sun was coming up. They traveled along the river, through a burned village. Casson saw signs in Flemish, so they were actually over the border, in Belgium. They drove for a long time, the roar of the tank engines was deafening, the smell of gasoline and scorched oil hung thick in the morning air. At Degrave’s signal he pulled to one side. Meneval cranked up the camera until the spring was tight, then they filmed the column—tanks coming over a hill, bouncing on their treads in a cloud of dust. They filmed the Algerians on the march, their faces dark and sweating, and the Vietnamese machine gunners, carrying spare barrels and steel boxes of ammunition. Moving up to battle, somewhere in Belgium.

They drove and filmed all day, then stopped in a forest, slept, ate some salted beef and lentils from ration tins. The officers waited for darkness, then ordered the column to move forward. The night was black and very warm. Casson bit his lip as he fought the wheel and shifted gears, dazed from the noise and the heat, close to exhaustion. To his left, on a wooded hillside, a flash lit up a grove of pine trees and the sound of a hollow thump came rolling down the hill, audible above the whine of the engine. What was it? But of course he knew what it was. Fascinated, he stared at the sideview mirror, a small fire flickered at the center of the dark glass, then the road curved and it was gone. Directly ahead of him, the silhouette of a tank’s turret gun traversed back and forth.

A soldier ran in front of him and waved for him to slow down. A group of men, shadows, moved restlessly around something on the ground. Casson saw one white face turned suddenly toward him, the eyes were wide with fright. Then an officer with a swagger stick swept it violently in the direction the column was headed—move, move—and Casson stepped on the gas. Another flare on the hillside. Then a flash blinded him. He took a hand from the wheel and pressed his eyes. A loud crack. Followed by a gentle patter as twigs and dirt rained down on the metal roof of the cab. They’re trying to kill you, Jean-Claude. The idea was an affront, he clenched his teeth and gripped the wheel harder. Two officers stood by a halted tank. After he’d gone past, one of them ran to catch up with him and banged on his door. “Stop! Is that gasoline in the back?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well then, back the truck up. We need it.”

Casson shifted into reverse, rolled back until he was even with the tank. A commander climbed out of the hatch, then vaulted to the ground. “That’s French fire!” he shouted. “Idiots! Clowns! What are they doing, shooting up here?”

“I assure you that it is not French fire, Lieutenant.” From his insignia, Casson could seee he was a major.

“What, Belgian? English?”

“No.”

Two soldiers wrestled a drum of gasoline to the edge of the truck, then Casson helped them to lower it onto its side. One of them attached a hose to the barrel and ran the other end into the tank’s fuel pipe. Overhead, the sound of fabric ripping and the top of a tree whipped like a rag in a hurricane. Gasoline sloshed on Casson’s shoes. The major had a lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth. “Careful there, you.” An aristocrat, talking to his groom, Casson thought. The major stepped back, his high boots supple and glistening. This was still the cavalry, the hulking tanks were simply machines they were forced to use.

A staff car came speeding through the column and skidded to a stop. A junior officer leaped out, ran up to the major and saluted. “Major Mollet, sir. The general’s compliments. Why are we under fire?”

“It is German artillery.”

“Sir.”

The officer ran back to the car. The gasoline drum was empty, Casson started to screw the cap back on the opening as the soldiers coiled the hose. From the car, an angry shout. Then the back door flew open. The junior officer ran around to that side and was joined by the driver. Casson looked down, afraid to stare. At the car, a polite struggle was under way—a muttered curse, a loud whisper. At last they managed to extricate the general from the backseat. He was enormously fat, his breath sighed in and out as he walked over to the major. The major saluted. “General Lebois, sir.”

“Mollet.” The general touched the brim of his hat with a forefinger. “What’s going on here?”

Two more explosions on the hillside. In the light, Casson could see the general’s skin, a web of broken purple veins on his cheeks.

“The Wehrmacht, sir.”

“They can’t be this far south.”

“Respectfully, sir, I believe they are.”

“No, it’s the damn English. All excited for no reason at all and shooting in the dark.”

“Sir.”

“Send a motorcycle courier over there. Somebody who speaks English.”

“Yes, sir.”

A shell landed on the road, about three hundred yards ahead of them. A truck had been hit. As it started to burn, there were shouts of “get water,” and “push it off the road.” Casson could see dark shapes running back and forth. The general growled, deep in his chest, like a dog that doesn’t want to move from its place on the rug.

The major said, “Perhaps it would be faster if we fired back.”

“No,” the general said. “Save the ammunition. Waste not, want not.”

“Very good, sir,” the major said.

Casson returned to his truck. A glance in the mirror, he could see the two aides, trying to get the general back in his car. Casson moved up the column, working his way around tanks, tapping his horn when people got in the way. It was slow, difficult work, he never stopped shifting gears. He had to wait while one tank attempted to push a second off the road. It had been hit and was on fire, orange flames and boiling black smoke. By the light of the fire Casson could read the name Loulou stenciled on its turret.

Dawn. The sky pale, swept with the wisps of white scud that marked the high wind blowing in from the Channel.

The road to the fort on the heights of Sedan worked its way around the edges of the city, then climbed past plowed fields and old forest. At the gate to the fort, the Peugeot was waved through but Casson was stopped. The sentries were drunk and unshaven. “What brings you here?” one of them said.

“We’re making movies.”

“Movies! You know Hedy Lamarr?”

“Dog dick,” said another. “Not those kinds of movies. War movies.”

“Oh. Then what the hell are you doing up here?”

The second man shook his head, walked over to the truck and offered Casson a bottle through the window. “Don’t let him get to you,” he said. “Have some of this.”

Casson raised the bottle to his lips and drank. Sharp and sour. The man laughed as he took the bottle back. “Come and see us, squire, after this shit’s done with.”

The hard Parisian sneer in the voice made Casson smile. “I will.”

“You can find us up in Belleville, at The Pig’s Ass.”

“See you then,” Casson said, shoving the clutch in.

“Red front!” they called after him.

Fortress at Sedan!

Raising and saluting the flag, morning reveille played on a bugle. Domestic life in the barracks—washing clothes, shining boots. Here are the cooks, preparing breakfast for the hungry poilus. A cannon, the famous French 75, is aimed out over the Meuse valley. A vigilant sentry keeps watch with binoculars—no Germans yet, but we’re ready for them when they come.

Captain Degrave had an old friend serving with an artillery regiment and the gunners fed them breakfast. Casson ached from the driving, he was filthy with oily soot, and he wanted to shave more than anything else in the world, but the food seemed to bring him back to life. The gunners were countrymen from the Limousin. They’d stewed some hens in a huge iron kettle, added spring onions and wild garlic from the pastures outside the fort, found the last of the winter carrots in an “abandoned” root cellar, added Tunisian wine, a lump of fat, and a fistful of salt, then served it smoking hot in a metal soup plate. Afterward he sat back against a stone wall and had a hand-rolled cigarette stuffed with pipe tobacco. Maybe the world wasn’t as bad as it seemed.

It was strange, he thought, to be suddenly pulled from one life and dropped down into another. In Paris it was a May morning, Marie-Claire and Bruno probably making love by the open window that looked out over the Bois de Boulogne. She was, he recalled, at best obliging about it, she really didn’t like to do it in the morning; she had to be courted. And then—a little Marie-Claire punishment—she wouldn’t take off her nightgown. She’d pull it up to her chin, then stick her tongue out, saying that if you insisted on making love like a peasant, well then by God you could just make love like a peasant. That was, at least, how she started out. As always with Marie-Claire, things got better later.

Of course it might be different with Bruno, but he doubted it. My God, he thought, it’s like another world. Another planet. The lawyers, Arnaud and Langlade, would be going off to their offices in an hour or so, smelling like cologne, their ties pulled up just right, flirting with the women they passed in the street.

Casson stood, looked out over the wall at the early sun just lighting up the Meuse, burning off the valley mist. Bibi Lachette would still be asleep, he thought. She seemed like the type who slept late, dead to the world. Would she do it in the morning? Mmm—no, not it—but something. Generous, Bibi. He certainly did like her. Not love exactly, it was more like they were two of a kind, and, he thought, in some parts of the world that might be even better than love.

From the heights the river didn’t look like much of a barrier, it was too pretty. Placid blue water that ran in gentle curves, you’d do better to paint it than to try and fight behind it. What had one of the gunners called it? Just a little pipi du chat—a cat pee. Christ, he thought, what the hell am I doing in a war?

Sunset. They’d filmed the commanding officer reviewing a company of infantry, backs stiff, thumbs on the seams of their trouser legs. Then Degrave had asked him to take the film over to the regimental headquarters building where the courier from Paris was due at seven to pick it up.

The road was made of cut stone and ran along a parade ground lined with cannon from Napoleon’s time. He slowed down when a siren sounded, hoarse and broken, and heard a drone somewhere above him. The last of the orange sun was in his face—he let the truck roll to a stop, shaded his eyes, stared up into the early evening light.

A plane popped out of a cloud, abruptly slid sideways—Casson saw a black Maltese cross as the wing lifted—then dove at a sharp angle. For a moment he was a spectator, fascinated by the theatre of it, clearly it had nothing to do with him. Then the edges of the wings twinkled and the whine of the engine became a scream, rising over the rattle of the plane’s machine guns. Casson jumped out of the truck and ran for his life. Stukas, he thought. Like the newsreels from Poland.

At the bottom of its dive, the Stuka released a bomb. Casson’s ears rang, a puff of warm air touched his cheek, he saw, a moment later, black smoke tumbling upward, lazy and heavy. Just ahead of him, from the roof of the headquarters building, a spray of orange sparks seemed to float into the sky amid the drumming of antiaircraft cannon. Then more Stukas, whine after whine as they dove. Casson reached the building, fought through the shrubbery, then rolled until he got himself wedged between the ground and the base of a brick wall.

He looked up, saw a Stuka turn on its back, then slide into a shallow dive, rotating very slowly as it headed for the earth, a thin line of brown smoke streaming from its engine. Then a second Stuka exploded, a ball of yellow fire, flaming shards spinning through the air. Casson’s heart was pounding. Thick smoke stood slow and ponderous above the fort and the wind reeked of gasoline. The fuel tanks, he realized, that was what they’d come for, gray domes that stood three stories high—the smell of burning petroleum was making him dizzy. The drone of the airplanes faded into the distance, heading north into Belgium.

They moved to a little village outside the city of Sedan, the vehicles parked in a farmyard. Meneval slept in the car, Degrave and Casson stayed awake, sitting on the running board of the truck. A mile to the west, the fort was still burning, but directly above them the night was starry and clear.

Degrave had a heavy, dark face, dark hair, thinning in front—he was perhaps a little old to be a captain—and there was something melancholy and stubborn in his character.

“We’ll film in the blockhouse tomorrow,” he said. “Down near the river. Then we’ll move on someplace else—the fort can’t hold much longer.”

Casson stared, not understanding.

“We’ve lost the air force,” Degrave explained. “It’s gone—eighty percent of it destroyed on the first morning of the war.”

After a moment Casson said, “Then, they’ll cross the border.”

Degrave was patient. “The war is over, Corporal,” he said gently.

Casson shook his head, “No,” he said, “I can’t accept that.”

Degrave reached inside his coat and produced a crumpled, flattened packet of Gauloises Bleu. Two remained, bent and ragged. Degrave offered the packet, Casson pulled one free with difficulty. Degrave had a special lighter, made from a bullet cartridge, that worked in the wind. After several snaps they got both cigarettes lit.

“We’re going to lose?” Casson said.

“Yes.”

“What will happen?”

Degrave stared at him a moment, then shrugged. How could he know that? How could anybody?

3:30 A.M.

The blockhouse was long and narrow, built into the hillside, and very hot and damp. It smelled like wet cement. A squad of gunners lay on the dirt floor and tried to sleep, staring curiously at Casson and the others when they arrived. There were four embrasures, narrow firing slits cut horizontally into the wall. Meneval set up his camera at the far end of the blockhouse, wound the crank and inserted a new roll of film. The sergeant in charge handed Casson a pair of binoculars and said, “Have a look.”

Casson stared out at the river.

“They tried twice, yesterday. A little way east of here. But they weren’t serious. It was just to see what we did.”

A field telephone rang and the sergeant went to answer it. “Fifteen seventy-two,” he said, a map reference. “It’s quiet. We’ve got the moviemakers with us.” He listened a moment, then laughed. “If she shows up here I’ll let you know.”

A three-quarter moon. Casson made a slow sweep of the far bank of the Meuse, woods and a meadow in brilliant ashen light. He could hear crickets and frogs, the distant rumble of artillery. Thunder on a summer night, he thought. When it’s going to storm but it never does.

Degrave was standing next to him, with his own binoculars. “Do you know François Chambery?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“My cousin. He’s also in entertainment—a pianist.”

“He performs in Paris?”

“He tries.”

Casson waited but that was all. “Where are you from, Captain?”

“The Anjou.”

Casson moved the binoculars across the trees. The leaves rustled, nothing else moved. In the foreground, the river seemed phosphorescent in the moonlight. To the west, the artillery duel intensified. It wasn’t thunder anymore, it sounded angry and violent, the detonations sharp amid the echoes rolling off the hillsides. “They’re working now,” somebody said in the darkness.

As Casson swept his binoculars across the forest, something moved. He tightened the focus until he could see tree trunks and leafy branches. Suddenly, a deer leaped from the edge of the woods, followed by another, then several more. They were colorless in the moonlight, bounding down the meadow to the bank of the river, then veering away into a grove of birch trees.

“What is it?” the sergeant said.

“Deer. Something chased them out of the woods.”

4:10

The moon fading, the light turning toward dawn shadow. Casson was tired, ran a hand across his face. In the woods, a heavy engine came to life. It sounded like a tractor on a construction site—plenty of gas fed into it on a chilly morning. Then, others. Behind Casson the soldiers grumbled and got to their feet. There were three Hotchkiss guns aimed out the embrasures. The crews got busy, working bolts, snapping clips into the magazines. Casson could smell the gun oil.

One of the tanks broke cover, just the front end of the deck and the snout of the cannon. “Leave him alone,” the sergeant said.

The French guns stayed silent. Meneval ran off a few seconds of film—they wouldn’t get much, Casson thought, not for another hour. The blockhouse was quiet, Casson could hear the men breathing. The tank reversed, disappeared into the forest. Was it over, Casson wondered. The soldier next to him, gripping the handles of a machine gun, said under his breath, “And . . . now.”

It was a close guess—only a few seconds off. A whistle blew, the Germans came out of the forest. The German tanks fired—orange flashes in the trees—and French antitank cannon fired back from the other blockhouses. The German infantry yelled and cheered, hundreds of them, running down the meadow carrying rubber boats and paddles. Clearly it was something they’d drilled at endlessly—it was synchronized, rehearsed. It reminded Casson of the news footage of gymnastic youth; throwing balls in the air or waving ribbons in time to music. Casson could hear the officers shouting, encouraging the soldiers. Some of the men reached the bank of the river and held the boats so their comrades could climb in.

The Hotchkiss guns opened up, tracer sailing away into the far bank and the troops boarding the rafts. German machine guns answered— fiery red tracer that seemed slow at first, then fast. Some of it came through the slits, fizzing and hissing in the blockhouse with the smell of burnt steel. The French gunners worked hard, slamming the short clips into the guns and ripping them out when they were done. On the far bank of the river, some soldiers bowed, others sat down, rolling on the ground or curling up.

Then it stopped. A few rubber boats turned in the current as they floated away, a few gray shapes floated along with them. The silence seemed strange and heavy. Casson let the binoculars hang on their strap and leaned against the lip of the gunport. Just outside, he heard twigs snapping and pounding footsteps on the dirt path. Two French soldiers ran past, then three more. The sergeant swore and hurried outside. Casson heard his voice. “Stop,” he called out. “You cannot do this—go back where you belong.”

The answering voice was cold. “Get out of the way,” it said.

At dusk, a message on the field telephone: the unit had been ordered out. Degrave’s allies in Paris, Casson suspected, knew the battlefield situation for what it was and had determined to save a friend’s life. “We’re being sent south,” Degrave explained as they packed up the equipment. “To the reserve divisions behind the Maginot Line.”

They tried. But in the darkness on the roads leading out of Sedan nobody was going anywhere. Thousands of French troops had deserted, their weapons thrown away. They trudged south, eyes down, among columns of refugees, most of them on foot, some pushing baby carriages piled high with suitcases. Casson saw artillery wagons—the cannon thrown off, soldiers riding in their place—pulled by farm horses; an oxcart carrying a harp, a hearse from Mons, a city bus from Dinant, the fire truck from Namur. Sometimes an army command car forced its way through, packed with senior officers, faces rigid, sitting at attention while the driver pounded on the horn and swore. Let us through, we’re important people, retreating in an important fashion. Or, as a soldier riding on Casson’s running board put it, “Make way, make way, it’s the fucking king.” Then, a little later, as though to himself, he said “Poor France.”

Casson and the others moved slowly south, at walking speed. Back on the Meuse, the Wehrmacht was attacking again and whatever remained of the Forty-fifth Division was fighting back—floods of orange tracer crisscrossed the night sky above the river.

It was hard work, coaxing the truck forward among the refugees. They slept for an hour, then started up again. In first light, just after dawn, Casson spotted a road marker and realized they’d traveled less than twenty miles from Sedan. And then, prompt to the minute at 7:00 A.M., the Stukas came to work. They were very diligent, thorough and efficient, taking care to visit each military vehicle. Casson ran for the ditch and up went the truck—gasoline, cameras, film stock, canned lentils. He sat in the dirt and watched it burn, caught up in a fury that amazed him. It made no sense at all—they’d stopped him from making idiotic newsreels that nobody would ever see—but something inside him didn’t like it.

But, whether he liked it or not, that was the end of the Section Cinématographique of the Forty-fifth Division, decommissioned in a cow pasture near the village of Bouvellement on a fine May morning in 1940. The Peugeot had also been a victim of the Stukas, though it had not burned dramatically like the truck. A heavy-caliber bullet had punched through the engine, which could do no more than cough and dribble oil when Degrave tried the ignition. “Well,” he said with a sigh, “that’s that.”

He then gave Meneval and Casson permission to go, filling out official little slips of paper that said they’d been granted emergency leave. For himself, he would make his way to the military airfield at Vouziers, not all that far away, and request reassignment.

Meneval said he would leave immediately for home, just outside Paris. His family needed him, especially his wife, who’d been absolutely certain that he was gone forever.

“You understand,” Degrave said, “that the fighting is going in that direction.”

“Yes, probably it’s not for the best,” Meneval said gloomily. “But, even so.” He shook hands and said good-bye and headed for the road.

Degrave turned to Casson. “And you, Corporal?”

“I’m not sure,” Casson said.

“What I would recommend,” Degrave said, “is that you make your way to Mâcon. There’s a small army base north of the city—it’s the Tenth Division of the XIV Corps. Ask for Captain Leduc, mention my name, tell him you are an isolée— a soldier separated from his unit. They’ll give you something to eat and a place to sleep, and you’ll be out of the way of, of whatever’s going to happen next.”

He paused a moment. “If the Germans ask, Corporal, it might be better not to mention that you were recalled to service. Or what you did. Other than that, I want to thank you, and to wish you luck.”

Casson saluted. Degrave returned the salute. Then they shook hands. “We did the best we could,” Degrave said.

“Yes,” Casson said. “Good luck, Captain.”

Casson headed for Mâcon. Sometimes, in a café, he heard the news on a radio. Nothing, he realized, could save them from losing the war. He left the roads, walked across the springtime fields. He ate bread he found in a bombed bakery in Châlons, tins of sardines a kind woman gave him in Chaumont. He was not always alone. He walked with peasant boys who’d run away from their units. He shared a campfire with an old man with a white beard, a sculptor, he said, from Brittany somewhere, who walked with a stick, and got drunk on some bright yellow stuff he drank from a square bottle, then sang a song about Natalie from Nantes.

As Casson watched, the country died. He saw a granary looted, a farmhouse burned by men in a truck, a crowd of prisoners in gray behind barbed wire. “We’ll all live deep down, now,” the sculptor said, throwing a stick of wood on the fire. “Twenty ways to prepare a crayfish. Or, you know, chess. Sanskrit poetry. It will hurt like hell, sonny, you’ll see.”

The villages were quiet, south of Dijon. The spaniel slept in the midday heat, the men were in the cafés at dusk, the breeze was soft in the faded light that led to evening, and the moon rose as it always had.