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
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