driving in both directions and spluttering motorcycles weaving in and out.
I imagine, although I didn’t make sure afterward, that it was the road from Aumagne to Rethel. In any case, we were getting near to Rethel, judging by the increasing number of signals and houses, the sort of houses you find around towns.
“Do you come from Belgium?”
I couldn’t think of anything else to say to Anna, who was sitting beside me on the trunk.
“From Namur. They suddenly decided, in the middleof the night, to set us free. We’d have had to wait until the morning to get our things, because nobody had the key to the place where they’re locked up. I preferred to run to the station and jump on the first train.”
I didn’t bat an eyelid. Perhaps, in spite of myself, I looked surprised, since she added:
“I was in the women’s prison.”
I didn’t ask what for. It struck me almost as natural. In any case, it was no more extraordinary than for me to be there in a cattle car and my wife and daughter on another train, or to have the driver killed on the footplate and, somewhere else, an old man wounded by a bottle which a machine-gun bullet had shattered in his hand. Everything was natural now.
“Are you from Fumay?”
“Yes.”
“That was your daughter, was it?”
“Yes. My wife is seven and a half months pregnant.”
“You’ll find her at Rethel.”
“Perhaps.”
The others, who had been in the army and were more practical than I was, spread the straw on the floor in readiness for the coming night. It formed a sort of huge communal bed. Some were already lying down on it. The card players kept passing around a bottle of brandy which never left their corner.
We drew into Rethel and there, all of a sudden, for the first time, we became aware that we weren’t ordinary people like the rest, but refugees. I say we, although none of my companions confided in me. All the same I think that in that short space of time we had come to react more or less in the same way.
It was the same sort of weariness, for instance, which could be seen on every face, a weariness very different from that which you feel after a sleepless night or a night’s work.
Perhaps we hadn’t quite reached a state of indifference, but each of us had given up thinking for himself.
Thinking about what, anyway? We knew absolutely nothing. What was happening was beyond us and it was no use thinking or arguing.
For heaven knows how many miles, for instance, I puzzled over the question of the stations. The little stations, the stops, as I have already said, were empty, without even a railwayman to rush out with his whistle and his red flag when the train appeared. On the other hand the bigger stations were packed with people, and police cordons had to be established on the platforms.
I finally hit on an explanation which seems to me to be the right one: namely, that the slow trains had been withdrawn.
The same was true of the roads, the empty ones probably having been closed to traffic for military reasons.
Somebody from Fumay, whom I didn’t know, told me, that very morning, when I was sitting beside Anna, that there was a plan for the evacuation of the town and that he had seen a poster about it at the town hall.
“Special trains have been arranged to take refugees to reception centers in the country where everything is ready to accommodate them.”
That may be true. I didn’t see the poster. I rarely set foot in the town hall, and when we got to the station my wife, Sophie, and I jumped on the first train we saw.
What made me think that my neighbor was right wasthat at Rethel nurses, boy scouts, and a whole reception service were waiting for us. There were some stretchers ready, as if somebody already knew what had happened to us, but I learned a little later that our train wasn’t the first to have been machine-gunned on the way.
“And our wives? Our kids?” the man with the pipe started shouting, even before the train had come to a
I imagine, although I didn’t make sure afterward, that it was the road from Aumagne to Rethel. In any case, we were getting near to Rethel, judging by the increasing number of signals and houses, the sort of houses you find around towns.
“Do you come from Belgium?”
I couldn’t think of anything else to say to Anna, who was sitting beside me on the trunk.
“From Namur. They suddenly decided, in the middleof the night, to set us free. We’d have had to wait until the morning to get our things, because nobody had the key to the place where they’re locked up. I preferred to run to the station and jump on the first train.”
I didn’t bat an eyelid. Perhaps, in spite of myself, I looked surprised, since she added:
“I was in the women’s prison.”
I didn’t ask what for. It struck me almost as natural. In any case, it was no more extraordinary than for me to be there in a cattle car and my wife and daughter on another train, or to have the driver killed on the footplate and, somewhere else, an old man wounded by a bottle which a machine-gun bullet had shattered in his hand. Everything was natural now.
“Are you from Fumay?”
“Yes.”
“That was your daughter, was it?”
“Yes. My wife is seven and a half months pregnant.”
“You’ll find her at Rethel.”
“Perhaps.”
The others, who had been in the army and were more practical than I was, spread the straw on the floor in readiness for the coming night. It formed a sort of huge communal bed. Some were already lying down on it. The card players kept passing around a bottle of brandy which never left their corner.
We drew into Rethel and there, all of a sudden, for the first time, we became aware that we weren’t ordinary people like the rest, but refugees. I say we, although none of my companions confided in me. All the same I think that in that short space of time we had come to react more or less in the same way.
It was the same sort of weariness, for instance, which could be seen on every face, a weariness very different from that which you feel after a sleepless night or a night’s work.
Perhaps we hadn’t quite reached a state of indifference, but each of us had given up thinking for himself.
Thinking about what, anyway? We knew absolutely nothing. What was happening was beyond us and it was no use thinking or arguing.
For heaven knows how many miles, for instance, I puzzled over the question of the stations. The little stations, the stops, as I have already said, were empty, without even a railwayman to rush out with his whistle and his red flag when the train appeared. On the other hand the bigger stations were packed with people, and police cordons had to be established on the platforms.
I finally hit on an explanation which seems to me to be the right one: namely, that the slow trains had been withdrawn.
The same was true of the roads, the empty ones probably having been closed to traffic for military reasons.
Somebody from Fumay, whom I didn’t know, told me, that very morning, when I was sitting beside Anna, that there was a plan for the evacuation of the town and that he had seen a poster about it at the town hall.
“Special trains have been arranged to take refugees to reception centers in the country where everything is ready to accommodate them.”
That may be true. I didn’t see the poster. I rarely set foot in the town hall, and when we got to the station my wife, Sophie, and I jumped on the first train we saw.
What made me think that my neighbor was right wasthat at Rethel nurses, boy scouts, and a whole reception service were waiting for us. There were some stretchers ready, as if somebody already knew what had happened to us, but I learned a little later that our train wasn’t the first to have been machine-gunned on the way.
“And our wives? Our kids?” the man with the pipe started shouting, even before the train had come to a
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