The Flesh, Albert Camus
The Flesh
IT WAS hard for us to speak of René Leynaud yesterday. Those who read in a corner of their newspaper that a Resistance journalist with that name had been shot by the Germans paid but fleeting attention to what for us was a dreadful, an atrocious announcement. And yet we must speak of him. We must speak of him so that the memory of the Resistance will be kept alive, not in a nation that may be forgetful, but at least in a few hearts that pay attention to human quality.
He had entered the Resistance during the first months. Everything that constituted his moral life, Christianity and respect for one’s promise, had urged him to take his place silently in that battle of shadows. He had chosen the pseudonym that corresponded to everything purest in him; to all his comrades on Combat he was known as Clair.
The only private passion he had kept—along with that of personal modesty—was poetry. He had written poems that only two or three of us knew. They had the quality he himself had—transparency. But in the daily struggle he had given up writing, indulging only in buying the most varied books of poetry, which he was saving to read after the war. As for everything else, he shared our conviction that a certain language and insistence on honesty would restore to our country the noble countenance we cherished. For months his place was waiting for him on this newspaper, and with all the blindness of friendship and affection we refused to accept the news of his death. Today that is no longer possible.
He will no longer speak that language it was essential to speak. The absurd tragedy of the Resistance is summed up in this frightful misfortune. For men like Leynaud entered the struggle with the conviction that no one had a right to speak until he had made a personal sacrifice. The trouble is that the unofficial war did not have the dreadful justice of the regular war. At the front, bullets strike at random, killing the best and the worst. But for four years behind the lines, it was the best who volunteered and fell, it was the best who earned the right to speak, and lost the ability to do so.
In any case, the man we loved will never speak again. And yet France needed voices like his. His exceptionally proud heart, protected by his faith and his sense of honor, would have found the words we needed. But he is now forever silent. And some who are not worthy speak of the honor that was identified with him, while others who are not trustworthy speak in the name of the God he had chosen.
It is possible today to criticize the men of the Resistance, to note their shortcomings, and to bring accusations against them. But this is perhaps because the best among them are dead. We say this because we are deeply convinced of it: if we are still here, this is because we did not do enough. Leynaud did enough. And today, having been returned to the soil he enjoyed for so short a time, having been cut off from that passion to which he had sacrificed everything, he may find consolation, we hope, in not hearing the words of bitterness and denigration now being applied to that poor human adventure in which we took part.
Never fear, we shall not make use of him, who never made use of anyone. He left the struggle unknown as he entered it unknown. We shall keep for him what he would have preferred—the silence of our hearts, an attentive memory, and the dreadful sorrow of the irreparable. But he will forgive us if we admit bitterness here where we have always tried to avoid it, and indulge in the thought that perhaps the death of such a man is too high a price to pay for granting others the right to forget in their behavior and their writings what was achieved during four years by the courage and sacrifice of a few Frenchmen.
COMBAT, 27 October 1944
ON THE 16th of May 1944, René Leynaud, bearing secret documents, was arrested by members of the Vichy Militia in Place Bellecour at Lyon. When he tried to flee, a rain of bullets aimed at his legs stopped him. After a short stay in the hospital, he was transferred to Fort Montluc, where he was to remain incarcerated until the 13th of June 1944. That day the Germans who were getting ready to evacuate Lyon picked out nineteen prisoners at Montluc who were considered to have played an important part in the Resistance. We know the names of only eleven of them. Between five and six a.m., Leynaud and eighteen of his fellow prisoners were gathered together in the courtyard. They were served coffee and then handcuffed. One by one, they climbed into a truck, which took them to the Gestapo headquarters in Place Bellecour.
They waited three quarters of an hour in the cellar of that building. When they were finally called, their handcuffs were removed and they were made to climb into the truck again with some German soldiers armed with machine guns. The truck drove out of Lyon in the direction of Villeneuve. At eleven o’clock it crept through Villeneuve and encountered a group of children returning from a walk. The prisoners and the children looked at each other for a time but didn’t exchange a word. Just beyond Villeneuve, opposite a grove of poplars, the truck stopped, the soldiers leaped to the ground and commanded the men to get out and go toward the woods. A first group of six left the truck and started toward the trees.
The machine guns immediately crackled behind them and mowed them down. A second group followed, then a third. Those who were still breathing were put out of their pain by a final shot. One of them, however, though frightfully wounded, managed to drag himself to a peasant’s house. From him we learned the details. Leynaud’s friends simply wonder whether he was in the first group or one of the later groups.
Leynaud was thirty-four. He was born on 24 August 1910 at Lyon-Vaise of parents from the Ardèche. He had begun his education at the public school and gone on to the Lycée Ampère in Lyon. While he was attending law school, he had begun as a journalist on Le Progrès of Lyon. It was probably during the years just before the war that he came to understand his love of poetry and his profound Christianity.
In September 1939 Leynaud is mobilized, fights in Lorraine, then in Belgium, takes part in the Dunkerque retreat, and, being far away from the official evacuation, nevertheless manages by some makeshift means to cross the Channel to Plymouth. He returns to France and at the moment of the armistice he is at Agen, sick and exhausted. I should like to point out, however, that none of his friends ever heard Leynaud talk of the part he had played in the war. We get these details from his wife. Early in 1942 Leynaud made contact with Resistance groups and was eventually to become local leader of the Combat movement in Lyon under the pseudonym of Clair.
For all of us, Leynaud’s death made an example of him. Yet before that we knew, just from the kind of attachment we felt for him, that his life (and we have just told the short, sharp story of that life) was exemplary. Living very quietly, absorbed by the love of his wife and his son, by the needs of the combat, he didn’t have many friends. But I have never known a single person who, loving him, failed to love him without reservation. This is because he inspired confidence. Insofar as it is possible for a man, he gave himself completely to everything he did. He never bargained about anything, and this is why he was assassinated. As solid as the short, stocky oaks of his Ardèche, he was both physically and morally strapping. Nothing could make the slightest dent in him when he had once made up his mind what was fair. It took a burst of bullets to subjugate him.
Up to now, I have spoken of Leynaud dryly and, so to speak, in a general way. But if it is true that I shall probably never again be able to speak freely of the man who was my friend, at least I can try to set down now a few more vivid images that I had already begun to put together.
He was only slightly above average height, with thick, curly hair, a rough-hewn face with gray eyes, a mobile and rather full mouth, a broad nose, and a sharp jaw. He dressed carelessly, but the shape of his body tended to stretch his clothing and give it a certain elegance.
In 1943, on my way through Lyon, I often stayed in his little room in Rue Vieille-Monnaie which his friends knew so well. Leynaud would do the honors rapidly, fussing about the bedside lamp and then, rising, would take cigarettes out of an earthenware pot and share them with me. “I smoke less than you,” he would say, “and, besides, I prefer my pipe.” He would take it out, in fact, and keep in in his mouth for a time. In my memory, those hours have remained as classic examples of friendship. Leynaud, who was going to sleep somewhere else, would stay until the curfew.
