The Sorrow and the Pity Page #4

because there was one value

that we all shared,

and that was caution.

We didn't know what the butcher thought,

or the milkman,

or the engineer or the intellectual.

We had no idea.

Like everyone else,

we stayed on our guard.

What do you think

people's main concern was back then?

Food.

That took up most of your time?

Definitely.

Animals were illicitly butchered.

One needed a bit of meat to survive.

s you know,

the French are very good at cheating.

One had to have a bit more bread

than the usual ration,

or a bit more tobacco

by smiling nicely at the tobacconist.

bit more of everything.

So every weekend, a regular parade

of cyclists would go for supplies.

They had devised a system

based on tickets, on ration cards.

Personally, I was a smoker,

and it was awful not having cigarettes.

It was a horrible situation.

People would do anything, even steal.

I got so desperate that I even rolled

artichoke leaves and smoked them.

The children who were born

during that time,

between 1942 and 1944,

should have suffered from rickets,

and I say this as a doctor.

In our family, it was ironic.

These young ladies have a brother,

who is 27 years old, and was born in 1942.

He's six foot one!

We fed him so much to avoid rickets

that he turned into a giant.

He's a great tennis player,

an architect, and a giant to boot.

Are you what they call "a bourgeois"

in a large provincial town?

If being bourgeois means eating properly,

hunting in Cologne,

having a hunting ground

in Sanscoin and in Srye,

and a son-in-law

who owns Lake Montcinire,

then I'm a bourgeois.

When did you first begin to experience

the consequences of the times,

in other words, persecution?

How did you feel about that?

Did anything happen?

Not before 1942.

The only extraordinary event that occurred

is that before the children were born,

once again,

in September 1942,

the hunting season was re-opened.

What an event.

It was important to the hunters.

Game had been untouched for two years

so there was an abundance of it.

It was a very satisfying experience

for those who owned a gun.

In their little nests in the backyard,

my little rabbits are so sweet.

Until recently, I hated hutches,

and I despised and insulted

our gentle little friends,

now the center of our attention.

Just think, a rabbit!

Firstly, it will delight the cook.

and as its skin dries in the wind,

the whole family rejoices.

Follow my example

and give rabbit breeding a try.

s you can see, I love, you love,

we all love rabbits in every form!

In reality, the French

aren't normally very involved in politics.

Once in a blue moon, they decide

to take action and storm the Bastille,

or to fight religious wars for 50 years,

or to initiate the French Revolution,

or to set off to conquer Europe.

But, normally speaking,

they're just as peaceable as anyone else.

One thing is for sure:

the French, in general,

Like a peaceful regime,

a regime which has authority,

but is preferably humane.

In any case,

they feel the need to be protected.

They're quite paternalistic.

Does this explains Ptain's popularity?

Definitely. I might add that,

as a sergeant in the French army,

I've seen a routed army.

and it's not a pretty sight.

There's no denying that, for some time,

Ptain was extremely popular.

He was viewed as one of

the good old guys, perhaps a bit senile,

but after all,

he had given himself to France.

That was a clever way of putting it.

He gave the gift of himself.

So everyone thought that an old guy

like him couldn't do any harm.

He could only help France.

t his age, what harm could he do?

These arguments, albeit feeble,

were how people justified Ptain.

THE MRSHL'S VISI I missed Mers-el-Kbir.

I only heard about what happened

two weeks later.

I never understood Mers-el-Kbir.

Even now, having read many books

on the subject of Mers-el-Kbir,

I still don't understand.

It was always a mystery to me.

Mers-el-Kbir was a mystery indeed.

Do you mean you don't understand

why the English did what they did?

No, I never really understood the English.

After leaving Churchill,

I was a member in the House of Commons,

I went to the House of Commons,

got my car,

and drove myself through Hyde Park.

In the middle of the park,

I saw a group of French sailors,

with their little red pompons

on their kepis.

They were running and playing

with an equal number of girls,

or "young ladies" rather.

They were running

and playing and screaming.

They couldn't understand a word

of what the other was saying.

Then a horrible feeling swept over me.

It was sheer luck

that I didn't crash the car,

because suddenly I remembered

Churchill's ultimatum I'd just read,

and I thought of those French boats

in Mers-el-Kbir,

where there were other sailors,

also wearing kepis with little red pompons,

and I wondered what was going

to happen to them tomorrow.

These are the victims of the most base

and loathsome attack ever.

Clearly, France's former ally only attacks

those who cannot fight back.

On the morning of the attack,

Admiral Gensoul received

the English ultimatum.

Admiral Somerville proceeded

to send several delegations,

in order to explain to Gensoul

the options proposed by Churchill:

they could join the Free French,

allow themselves to be disarmed,

or head to a neutral port

which was out of German reach.

Admiral Gensoul refused all three options,

as he considered them

dishonorable solutions.

What we didn't dare to risk happening

was letting the boats

fall into enemy hands.

We simply couldn't take the risk.

But wasn't there also a psychological risk?

Yes, a considerable risk.

It allowed the Germans

to spread propaganda.

and Vichy, too.

Lord knows they used the opportunity.

I think we understood that, but at the time,

we had very little choice in the matter.

There were 1,600 sailors

killed by the British Navy.

The British Navy attempted

to take over the French Navy.

That was clear to us at the time.

We thought that...

We believed the armistice

would be respected by the Germans.

In France, we thought,

as the Vichy government had told us,

that the French Navy would

never be given over to the Germans.

For us, that was a fact.

I was brought up to believe

that promises were kept,

and I just couldn't imagine

that there could be political dealings

that would eventually lead

to the French Navy being given away.

There was no way.

So we viewed it as a brutal attack.

There was also

an additional moral problem,

in that, according to many testimonies,

the sailors whose boats were shelled

by the British

believed at that moment

they were going to cast off

in order to join the British fleet.

That's terrible.

Had we felt there was any hope of that,

we would never have attacked.

But there was no hope.

Everything we said about the Germans

was proved in Bizerta,

where the Germans proceeded to give

the French admiral

twenty minutes to surrender,

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes