The Foundling's War by Michel Déon Page A

virgin ahead of them, and the authority of Madame and her assistant madam impressed them deeply. There were no brawls, nor Bacchic outbursts.
     
    Let us make the most of the moment while our two heroes slumber to satisfy the reader’s curiosity about a point of history that the author has, in his Machiavellian way, so far left blank. What happened when the twelve rifles of the SS Grenadiers took aim in the little village square where Constantin Palfy, Jean Arnaud, Francis Picallon and the surveyor Jacques Graindorge had been lined up to be shot? Of course, apart from themselves and Obersturmführer Karl Schmidt, no one
really
thought they would be shot. We would not have undertaken the narrative of Jean Arnaud’s long sentimental education if we had had to call a halt at the age of twenty because a uniformed idiot who played the violin had ordered a platoon of his men to execute four Frenchmen after a good lunch. No. Jean Arnaud and the strange Constantin Palfy will have a hard life, but it is Karl Schmidt who will be the first to die, which no one, except for his wife and children, will greatly mind. But let us abandon Karl Schmidt, whose only virtue was to add a grotesque element to a macabre spectacle. The thing we need to know is that the SS Grenadiers did take aim at our friends. It was a ghastly, melancholy minute and few who have survived such a thing can bring themselves to talk about it. Twelve black holes and an NCO, his boots squarely planted where he stands, revolver in hand for the coup de grâce, are an image you don’t forget. If you escape, by a miracle, that image awakens a deeper respect for life, and the three-line notices announcing the death of a hostage jump out of the news with a significance so harrowing that it can become unbearable. What does one think about at such a moment? It is as difficult for the survivor to remember as it is for anyone else to imagine. If wewere to ask Jean Arnaud, he would answer, ‘I don’t know. Nothing, maybe. Two or three fleeting memories: Maman in the kitchen of her house, holding the iron up to her cheek, Papa limping across the garden, Antoinette showing me her bottom at the foot of the cliffs, Chantal in our bedroom in Rue Lepic, or Geneviève, my real mother, embarking at Cannes to escape from the war. But all of it very fast, very superficial. Nothing, in fact. And not even a thought for my soul’s salvation. No, really, nothing dignified or interesting, not the sort of thing you read in classical tragedies, romantic plays, or heroic novels.’ Come to the point, I hear you say. But the author cannot help but go on hesitating to say what saved Jean and Palfy that day, so utterly improbable does it seem here. It would be so much easier to explain that it was all a poor and violent joke on the Obersturmführer’s part to test the four Frenchmen’s equanimity, or, more prosaically, to divert himself after a campaign so rapid that the SS units intended for the fiercest fighting had not had to fire a shot in anger. Valiant warriors who had advanced with the thought of heroic battles to come had experienced considerable frustration. They had been drilled for war, not sightseeing. The firing squad was thus not merely a macabre joke. A few seconds longer, and Jean and Palfy would have been shot. So we are left with no alternative but to invoke Providence, that benevolent entity that sometimes stoops to take a hand in human destinies and delay deaths without giving reasons, just to amuse itself, or so it seems, to toy with existences that are no more or less dear to it than others and that it only identifies by caprice or a taste for sarcasm.
    On this occasion, then, Providence appeared in the guise of an open-topped car belonging to the German army, an elegant high-bodied vehicle driven by a helmeted chauffeur whose chinstrap was immaculately placed. On the rear seat sat three individuals: two French soldiers in forage caps, flanking a Wehrmacht colonel. They had