by Simon Winder
In his chilling autobiographical novel Flight to Arras, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry described flying over northern France three days before the evacuation at Dunkirk began. He was on a reconnaissance mission, but he understood it to be wholly quixotic – the French air force had been destroyed, the army beaten and there was nothing therefore to reconnoitre. He flew in a spirit of stoicism and self-mockery, assuming he would be killed. He describes Arras and the region around it as all on fire, ‘dark red like iron on an anvil’, and has the terrible idea that the flames are being fed by ‘the sweat of men, the inventions of men, the art of men, the memories and heritage of men’. He made it back to his base and gave his report:
‘Well, I … Ah! Fires. I saw fires. Is that of interest…?’
‘No. Everything’s on fire. What else?’
Some 800 ships were involved in getting the troops out of Dunkirk, but during the summer the entire coast was a mass of activity. Everywhere British demolition teams were destroying docks and blowing up oil tanks. From Brest to the Hook of Holland there were miserable arguments between soldiers who had been allies only days before as the British tried to damage and block everything they could. A specialized British ship went along the Channel lifting up and cutting all the communication cables between Britain and France. The Dutch royal family was got across, as was forty tons of gold from Rotterdam. In extraordinary scenes at Antwerp, a huge fleet was able to escape just ahead of the Germans: 26 merchantmen, 50 tugs and some 600 barges, dredgers and floating cranes: yet again, one of the world’s greatest ports seized up.
Both sides were improvising like mad as, weeks before, every part of what happened at the end of May and in early June would have been inconceivable to any of the combatants. It is easy now to see that the Germans should have thrown everything at Dunkirk, but they were both dazed by their success and aware that much of France was still protected by a rapidly organizing Anglo-French force along the Somme. These days of indecision doomed them: France was defeated but, because of Dunkirk, Britain did not need to feel defeated, and the Germans were now obliged to cross the Strait. To do this they had to defeat the British air force, as a preliminary to defeating the British navy, as a preliminary to sending across a highly vulnerable flotilla of small ships filled with an expeditionary force to defeat a rearmed and much larger British army. As it was, even the first part of this sequence failed. Germany remained a regional power, boxed in by Britain’s global resources, as in 1914–18. The Germans could see the White Cliffs, but they could not reach them. Admiral Raeder despaired – the German navy had only two, damaged battleships and ten destroyers, whereas the British navy had thirteen battleships and battlecruisers and a hundred and sixty-nine destroyers.
It is striking that the three key figures in the future of France all came from the far north. Pétain was born a few miles west of Lille, de Gaulle in Lille. The latter’s birthplace in the city’s northern suburbs is today maintained as an almost religious museum.3 De Gaulle was married in Calais, a fact now marked there by huge, excruciatingly banal statues of Mr and Mrs de Gaulle walking along like a concrete Darby and Joan. Pétain gained his reputation fighting on the Artois front. He and de Gaulle knew each other very well between the wars in the garrison at the Arras citadel.
Both Pétain and de Gaulle are, of course, still interesting figures, but perhaps the most astonishing of the three men who decided France’s future was Philippe Leclerc de Hautecloque, born just south of the Somme, schooled in Amiens (home now to another truly crummy monument). He came from a grand and hyper-military family – direct ancestors had fought in two crusades, the Hundred Years War, the War of the Austrian Succession and Napoleon’s campaigns, including Russia. One had fought in the war with Samory Touré, mentioned in chapter twelve, both his uncles had died in the First World War and his father had been strikingly heroic. He had himself been in the occupation force in Trier in the 1920s. He fought in 1940 at the Battle of Lille – a crucial action in holding the Germans away from Dunkirk – and was captured. He escaped twice, eventually getting over the Pyrenees to Lisbon and taking a neutral ship to London to join de Gaulle. De Gaulle appointed him ruler of French Cameroon. De Gaulle announced this with no authority whatsoever – but it was one of those acts, effectively pretending Pétain’s France did not exist, that began the process of France’s political and intellectual rescue. Leclerc (he adopted this name rather than calling himself de Hautecloque to protect his family from reprisals by the Germans) then set about pushing pro-Vichy forces out of Africa and securing the Central African colonies for the Free French. With an extraordinarily mixed bag of lightly armed flotsam and jetsam, Leclerc in early 1941 set out to invade Axis territory – the remote Italian Libyan oasis of Kufra.
The battle was a tiny one (300 to 400 men on either side) but won by the French. Leclerc then set out to redeem his country. At a time when the Germans seemed universally triumphant and their handful of surviving opponents struggled to imagine how they could be defeated, Leclerc simply announced to his ragtag group in the far depths of the Sahara that they would not stop fighting until the tricolour flew again on Strasbourg Cathedral. They took an oath to this effect and set off. It is unknown how many of those present were privately incredulous at the idea, but Leclerc did exactly as he had said. With delays and setbacks, Leclerc fought his way all the way to the Libyan coast; retrained and reorganized his vastly expanded army in Britain; landed at Utah Beach, fought his way east, liberated Paris, taking the German surrender there, repeatedly defeated German forces in eastern France, liberated Strasbourg on 23 November 1944 and raised the tricolour on the cathedral.
The long years of the war bored, terrified but also infantilized almost everyone. Individuals such as Leclerc, who were genuinely able to create their own freedom of action, were rare. What had been normal life before the summer of 1914, and glimpsed briefly again in the late 1920s and late 1930s (the latter, admittedly, in the context of the boom created by rearming), vanished. The British blockade and German U-boat counter-blockade paralysed commerce. Western coasts became military zones. It was a world substantially without men – almost two million French troops were captured in 1940 and the majority of them stayed captive in Germany for the duration (re-emerging as a shunned and humiliated reminder of defeat in 1945).4 Some 600,000 young Frenchmen were forced to work in Germany, many in the Rhineland or Ruhr. They were often obliged to go there by their communities (sometimes in return for POWs being freed by the Germans) and the survivors were again often viewed with terrible lack of justice as tainted on their return. In some respects there was an odd congruence with the Rhineland Germans. There too normal life was lost sight of, most young men had vanished (and were, for the first time, being killed in the same huge numbers as in 1914–18 from autumn 1941 onwards). The brief, euphoric promise of June 1940, that through Hitler’s genius a new, peaceful German Europe had been created at a minimal cost in lives, faded away.
The Low Countries found their great ports reduced mostly to military use and were themselves reduced to a state of near inanition. In Belgium Jews were rounded up and placed in camps in Mechelen and elsewhere before transportation to the east. Of ninety thousand Jews only forty thousand survived. As in France, this was largely carried out by local collaborators. The Germans during the First World War had stirred up Flemish dislike of the francophone elite and did the same again now. There were many competing geographical fantasies. Some Flemish fascists wanted to recreate the Spanish/Burgundian state, incorporating the Netherlands, Belgium and the old Flemish areas of northern France which were now under German military rule from Brussels, including Lille and Arras. Himmler wanted something grander: an SS-run Reichsgau of Burgundy with its capital at Nanzig (Nancy), which would have recreated something like Charles the Bold’s state plus much of Champagne. Kaiser Wilhelm had thought along similar lines, and once, before 1914, proposed this to Leopold II in return for Belgium allying with Germany. In both cases the idea was to tear off such a large pie
ce of France that it could never recover as a great power – a fearful possibility that would have been entirely familiar to Louis XI and his predecessors. The permanent emergency of the war impeded such map-drawing fantasies until it was too late.
Armageddon
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of writing this book was an intermittent sense of walking through urban spaces which had once been filled with absolute terror. What is now expressed as cheaply built, gloomy shopping streets or rows of identikit housing is the scar tissue left from in many cases just a few moments of devastation. A handful of cities were bombed repeatedly, but years could go by in nerve-racked safety, with futile air-raid drills and messing about with fire engines – and then catastrophe would hit. In the years between the fall of France and the landings in Sicily, the Western Allies realistically had only aerial bombing with which to threaten German Europe. The experience of the Blitz in Britain had shown both that people were strikingly resilient in the face of bombing and that dispersal of people and factories over thousands of square miles made bombing horrible, but militarily ineffective. Over the enormously greater area of Occupied Europe, it was vaguely assumed that the result would be different. In the end, bombing was crucial for unintended reasons: because it diverted huge German resources (the vast arrays of anti-aircraft guns alone could have won entire battles in the East) and ultimately ended the German air force as thousands of its planes and pilots were destroyed defending German air space: by D-Day the weapon that had terrified the Anglo-French forces in 1940 had more or less disappeared.
The sense of doom – that something irreparable once happened in a place – makes some famous historical towns more or less unvisitable. Kleve is one of the most shocking. Eradicated by the RAF in a few minutes to allow the British army to march into Germany, it lost some 90 per cent of its buildings. Still you can walk along Duke Street and Castle Street and Swans Street, but the old processional way to the castle (itself rebuilt) is a grim parody of what was once there, with spaces which once contained fountains or markets just left blank or uneasily filled with modern replacements. The Rhine and Ruhr were deluged in incendiaries and high explosive because they were important centres of industry, but also because they were close by: it was easy to hit Cologne rather than important to do so. Some towns survived until very late in the fighting. As the Allies advanced in the final months of the war, the features which had once, centuries ago, given these Rhineland towns importance (a bit of high land for a cathedral or ramparts, control of a river crossing) allowed some random German officer to think of them again as strongpoints. The Allies could also, staring at their maps, make any town into a potential junction or concentration point, and so in a few hours or even minutes blameless spots like Worms, Freiburg or Colmar found themselves destroyed.
Both sides were aghast at the artistic and historical damage being done whereas the human cost was the point, but military necessity, added to a sense that the towns represented a historic Germandom which had fed Nazism, won. The Swiss border created strange problems. The German enclave of Konstanz had no blackout, blazing with light throughout the war so that Allied bombers would assume it was part of Switzerland, rather than a prosperous, arms-producing German city. This worked very well. By sheer bad luck, the matching Swiss enclave in the German territory of Schaffhausen was mistaken by American bombers for Freiburg and devastated, with a hundred dead. I have spent some ten years off and on walking around these towns and it is impossible not to flinch at what the shoddy 1950s town centres of places such as Koblenz or Essen permanently memorialize. Towns were destroyed for different reasons. It is routine for anyone driving off the Dover ferry to shake their heads about what a dump Calais is as they drive through it, but there are serious reasons for this. It was flattened by the Germans in 1940, partly rebuilt, but then flattened by the Allies in 1944 simply as part of their plan to make the Germans think that the Allied invasion would land there.
One shocking surprise comes with the two Dutch cities just west of Kleve, Nijmegen and Arnhem. I was visiting Nijmegen to see the tiny remains of the Carolingian Palace (which had survived, tantalizingly, as a wonderfully gnarled pile until mostly knocked down in 1798) but this ancient, history-steeped place felt as bad as Koblenz. This surprise simply came from my own ignorance, as the town centre, it turned out, had been eradicated by American bombers in 1944, mistaking it for Kleve. Some 750 people were killed. Arnhem was, famously, the focus of the disastrous Operation Market Garden. In film and popular memory, this was about the seizure of the Rhine bridge there. But the fighting was all over the western suburbs, with countless houses destroyed (some of the rebuilt ones have plaques on them describing their specific fates). After the Allies were defeated, the city’s population were expelled by the Germans and it became a military zone. When finally liberated by the First Canadian Army in April 1945 Arnhem had effectively ceased to exist.
Everywhere liberation by the Allies was part of a terrifyingly random pattern, with some towns spared and others fought for. The French, Belgian and Dutch citizens were already living in overwhelmingly distorted communities, riven with distrust, black-marketeering, hunger, violence and ideological and familial ruin. The sequence in which the Allied armies landed at the five D-Day beaches (from west to east: US, US, UK, UK, Canada) dictated the final eleven months of the war, with the US forces liberating most of France and the British and Canadians heading north-east. Each town or village was either eradicated or swept through with cheers and flowers, depending on whether or not the Germans decided to defend it. The Canadians found themselves entangled in particularly horrible fighting along western canals, clearing the defenders from the opposite shore with flame-thrower tanks. Some ninety thousand German troops defended Zeeland, blocking Allied use of the Scheldt and the opening up of Antwerp. This was probably the most effective part of the Germans’ Atlantic Wall and is still today littered with freakish chunks of metal and concrete left from the fighting. In the same place where the hopeless Walcheren expedition of 1809 had floundered, the Canadians and British took some thirteen thousand casualties to defeat the fanatical (and completely pointless) defence. In a horrific coda to the fighting, it turned out that various dikes had been damaged and subtly weakened. In the Great North Sea Storm of 1953 this proved fatal as they gave way, drowning fifteen hundred Zeelanders.
Everywhere the Allies liberated, a divide opened up between those who had collaborated and those who had resisted. In the post-war period many towns had different cafes for those who had been on either side. Families were split, administrations turned upside down. Released POWs would find themselves in places they no longer recognized, sometimes with wives who had long settled down with someone else. One final collaborationist flourish was the SS Charlemagne Division of French Fascist volunteers. The number of men actively fighting with the Germans was never huge – the ‘Rexist’ Belgian leader Léon Degrelle’s Walloon Legion was only a few thousand men, mostly killed on the Eastern Front.5 The Charlemagne Division was almost self-consciously set up to perform a last stand in 1944, filled with brutalized scrapings from the collapsing Vichy regime, while the senior political leaders escaped to the Swabian castle of Sigmaringen to await their fates. Members of the Charlemagne Division found a sort of martyrdom as the very last defenders of Hitler’s bunker. I mention it here because of its curious badge. It was split down the middle – on one half there were fleurs-de-lys, and on the other the old Imperial eagle: in other words it was expressing the union of West Francia and East Francia, with the Third Reich finally crushing within the line that ran down the badge’s middle the now cowed and absorbed territory of Lotharingia. But yet again – as the division’s last members were shot or went into many years of Soviet captivity – this turned out to be premature.
Charlemagne comes home
I once spent a few days in the small Ardennes town of Saint-Hubert, north-east of Sedan. It is an absurdly interesting place, built around a huge shrine to St Hubert, the patron saint of
hunters, who saw a vision of a stag with Christ crucified shining between its antlers, with the church as a result stuffed with stag motifs. It is a serious Catholic site, but also somewhere with fun ceremonies in the church involving woodsmen in special uniforms blowing horns. An unimprovable woodland park filled with groinking and rooting wild boar completes the picture, plus a superb restaurant that converts the boar into small, succulent slices, cooked with forest fruit. I felt myself becoming ever more bluff, reactionary, devout, muddy-booted as the days went by, thinking about buying a serge cloak and perhaps a small knife with which to whittle wooden duck-calls.
Nowhere could really be more harmless or local, a summa of the hedgehog-like manner of so many of the places I have been to. I was just visiting a small church on the town’s outskirts, cheerfully regretting that I did not have a hat which I could doff, when I realized there was something wrong with the building. Far from being ancient, it was oddly new. With a sinking heart I realized that my silly idyll was, as usual, going to be invaded by the twentieth century. It turned out that during the Battle of the Bulge a random V-1 killed an family living next to the church and destroyed its west end.
The Ardennes region drifts around between Dinant and Aachen, Prüm and Bouillon, Luxembourg City and Sedan. It is a seemingly endless sequence of wooded valleys, with the logic of bus routes and roads incomprehensible from ground level. At its heart lies the wonderful town of Stavelot, an ancient abbey, famous for centuries, but chiefly for its abbot having been the great Wibold, counsellor to three emperors, compulsive letter-writer and ambassador to Byzantium. Stavelot is also the home of an inn which the young Apollinaire had to abscond from because his mother could not pay the bill. This slightly thin link has been enough to create a superb Apollinaire study room, with many editions of his poems, and packed with photos of this enchanting, heavy-drinking man (when he was in Stavelot he still had his original Polish name of Albert Kostrowicki – he was known to his friends as Albert Cointreau-Whiskey).