by Lisa Hilton
He had missed De Gaulle by days. On 31 August, the general had embarked at Liverpool for Dakar. De Gaulle was adamant it was essential that the Free French begin their fight as soon as possible on French soil, explaining to his staff on 15 July that he planned to establish the capital of the ‘empire at war’ in Africa. Several French colonies had already declared for him: Tahiti, Chandernagor, New Caledonia and New Hebrides. On 27 July he put out a call to the remaining territories of the French empire to join him. By the end of August Chad, Cameroon, the Congo and Ubangi-Shar had rallied to the general, who had recognized rather before Hitler did the crucial role that Africa was to play in the war. Free French territory had suddenly expanded from the space occupied by De Gaulle’s feet to immense swathes of Africa, of which De Gaulle believed Dakar to be the crucial locus.
De Gaulle’s attempt to take Dakar was a disaster. Arriving with his pathetic little mongrel fleet, he tried the first phase of his plan (unfortunately codenamed Happy), which was to take the port without violence. The governor general turned a machine-gun on the Free French negotiators and imprisoned the leaders of Gaullist demonstrations in the city. After some halfhearted shelling of the Vichy ship Richelieu, a small landing party was put ashore, and three Free French were killed. De Gaulle had no wish to pit Frenchman against Frenchman and he and his British colleague, Admiral Cunningham, agreed to retreat. Churchill countermanded this, goaded by the British press and the scorn of Washington, and Dakar was shelled, resulting in severe damage to a ship from each side and the loss of 2,000 lives, half of them inhabitants of Dakar, 200 of them French. Some observers suggested that De Gaulle came to the brink of suicide at this point, though Churchill had defended him in the Commons, taking full responsibility for the debacle and reaffirming his trust in the general. The African adventure did produce some successes. De Gaulle was greeted by enthusiastic crowds in Cameroon and Chad on his way back to London, Vichy troops surrendered to Philippe Leclerc de Hautecloque (abruptly renamed Leclerc) at Gabon and the general felt confident enough to create the first Free French decoration, the Ordre de la Libération.
Gaston and De Gaulle were reunited on 18 November 1940. De Gaulle beamed with joy when he saw his old friend and immediately asked him if he would take the role of director of political affairs of Free France. It was a dauntingly broad portfolio. Reporting directly to De Gaulle, Gaston was to be responsible for gathering and exploiting information concerning the political situation in France and its empire, with the aim of penetrating every aspect of ‘political, social, religious, economic, professional, intellectual’ life and emphasizing the necessity of a united national interest. Foreign affairs, insofar as they had an impact on French politics, were also to be closely considered. Accordingly, Gaston’s bureau was to be divided into three sections: liaison with the Allied information services, action in France and the empire and liaison with the direction of foreign affairs.
Strategically, the rallying of the African territories had greatly strengthened the position of the Free French with their allies. They could offer air and land routes to the Sudan, Libya and Egypt, favourable trade in essentials like coffee, rubber, palm oil and cotton and protection for Southern Atlantic naval bases. Less positive was the effect of Dakar on the already precarious relationship between De Gaulle and Roosevelt.
If Nancy Mitford’s subsequent vociferous loathing for Americans had a political source, it was Gaston’s accounts of the contempt with which De Gaulle believed he had been treated by the American president. When Gaston had first arrived to join the Free French in London, the general had remarked: ‘The London French, my dear fellow, fall into two groups: those who are in the United States and those who are getting ready to leave.’ From the first, as America continued to recognize Vichy France, the States represented a threat to De Gaulle’s authority, the French empire and the potential legitimacy of France’s position in a post-war Europe. Though their views on the enervated state of the French body politic in the Thirties were essentially similar, the mutual suspicion and dislike that prevailed between the two leaders, compounded by what De Gaulle saw as a lengthy chronology of affront, culminating in the exclusion of France from the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks summit and her absence from the Yalta, San Francisco and Potsdam conferences, compromised their collaboration throughout the war and De Gaulle’s American policy after it. Gaston had strong views on American cultural depravity and the nastiness of ‘le high grade’ pork supplied in rations after the liberation, but his attitude was affable compared to De Gaulle’s aggrieved aggressiveness, while his genius for diplomacy contributed significantly to the maintenance of this most fragile, volatile and crucial of relationships.
11
POOR FROGS
‘They’re a dirty lot. I used to be in a hotel as a chambermaid and we had to take them. They ruined all the nice rooms in no time.’ This comment, recorded by Mass Observation from a Cricklewood resident, was typical of the dislike and prejudice faced by many of the 4,000 French refugees who had managed to make their way to London between May and June 1940. Prior to the war, MO reports suggested that the Germans were regarded more favourably by many British people than the French. Throughout the Thirties, the Francophobe stereotype of the bearded, lubricious Frenchman had been associated with a suspicion of aggressive militarism; after May 1940, this was replaced with a contempt for their effete passivity, though the lubricity remained. The bureaucratic chaos the refugees found in Britain after Dunkirk was little better than that they had fled. The British authorities’ response was well intentioned but badly organized, accommodation and billeting allowances had been planned for but not yet put in place.
The majority of refugees were mothers with children and young men, predominantly from reserved occupations, and the latter, in the Phoney War atmosphere of paranoia about fifth columnists and parachuting nuns, were immediately perceived as a potential threat. Most were rounded up into ill-staffed camps in the south-east, Midlands and north-west, where enforced idleness and insanitary conditions had a deleterious effect on morale. De Gaulle toured several such camps, where the men slept under canvas, observing that they felt betrayed after Dunkirk and were conscious of ill treatment. In particular they were distressed by the compulsory presence of armed guards and barbed-wire fencing. ‘I feel ashamed of being a British woman, ’ wrote one camp visitor, ‘every time I go to the camp and see … that awful infirmary.’1
The fall of France had come as a profound psychological shock to the British. ‘Bleeding French’ was a remark heard by many Mass Observation reporters. The British didn’t want the refugees, and the refugees didn’t want to be there. For many Londoners, the arrival of escapees at the capital’s stations was the first evidence, in the eerie calm of those first months, that a war was being fought at all. George Orwell described the silence with which they were greeted, a silence remembered also by the diarist Mollie Panter-Downs, who noted that the French defeat was so overwhelming it could not be spoken of. Paul Johnson vividly recalls the plight of servicemen who had fled Dunkirk, ‘destitute, with nothing but their greatcoats’. While MO reports suggest that the overwhelming attitude to the French, including their suspiciously unknown leader, was negative and mistrustful, many did express pity for the refugees’ plight. Station porters carried their pathetic belongings for nothing, and advertisements for missing family members were placed free of charge. In the French press, at stations and in reception centres, heartbreaking announcements began to appear: ‘Grillot, Françoise, age 2 and a half (family of 12), from Luyères was with her elder sister in a military bus. Her sister was very seriously hurt … she fainted and since that moment, no news of little Françoise, who has disappeared.’
No statistics exist as to the number of children, of a total of 90,000 who were separated from their parents after the invasion, arrived orphaned in Britain.
One of Gaston’s first duties was liaising between the Free French and Vere Ponsonby, the 9th Earl of Bessborough, head of the newly created Dep
artment of French Welfare. Bessborough supervised propaganda concerning De Gaulle’s movement, the welfare of French civilians and refugees and the occupation or repatriation of members of the French armed forces if they chose not to join the Free French. Recruitment was initially poor. Of 11,550 French sailors in Britain at the outbreak of war, only 882 opted for the Free French and just 300 from a permanent expat population of 10,000. The military was better represented, with 2,000 joining by July 1940. What to do with the remainder was Bessborough’s headache, and it quickly became Gaston’s. Their job was complicated because the French Welfare department was the administrative centre for no fewer than twenty-eight separate charities and associations that concerned themselves with the French, as a consequence of which Bessborough’s days at his headquarters at the Savoy were mostly spent arbitrating internal quarrels.
The atmosphere was not much better at 4 Carlton Gardens, the Free French headquarters. Outwardly, the general’s routine revealed him as a giant be-jodhpured automaton, arriving punctually from the Connaught Hotel at nine, proceeding straight to his office next to Gaston’s, overlooking St James’s Park, returning to the Connaught at 1pm for a heavy luncheon, including digestif and cigar, then heading back to the office to work until eight. To the MP and diarist ‘Chips’ Channon, who spied him strutting ‘insolently’ along Jermyn Street, De Gaulle appeared serene in his self-proclaimed role of saviour of France. Within the eccentric, extremist atmosphere of Carlton Gardens, his friable self-esteem and obsession with French dignity could produce an atmosphere of near hysteria.
Within the broader context of the war, the British government’s principal problems with France in 1940 were reconciling their support of the Free French with Roosevelt’s mistrust, relations with Vichy, De Gaulle’s status and that of the nascent French Resistance. De Gaulle’s goal was to achieve united control of all French resistant movements while negotiating their volatile relationships within the Allies. Gaston’s principal problem was controlling De Gaulle. The general had ‘never pretended to like the English. But coming to them as a beggar, with his country’s wretchedness branded on his forehead and in his heart, was unbearable.’2 Harold Macmillan, who knew De Gaulle during the North African campaign, described him as a combination of ‘terrible inferiority complex and spiritual pride’.3
Gaston loved political prestige, but found its milieu lugubrious. Much as he worshipped the general, he never claimed De Gaulle was much fun socially. Much more to his taste were the society acquaintances he had developed during his period at Oxford, and as often as he could he escaped from Carlton Gardens, which shared ‘that heavy atmosphere which envelops all power’ to spend time with ‘les gens du monde’. Not everyone was thrilled with his society airs. Georges Boris, former Cabinet director to Leon Blum, remarked: ‘We needed an administrator, what we got was a dancer.’4 Many names familiar to readers of the Tatler, including Nancy Mitford, were keen to show their support for the Free French. Lady Peel opened a hotel in her house in Baron Square, Lady Spears donated funds for a Free French hospital, a Churchill cousin set up a restaurant at Olympia for Free Frenchwomen and Olwen Vaughan established the Petit Club Français in St James’s Place.
Officially known as the Canteen of the Allies, the Petit Club was one of the landmarks of Free French London. There were never enough funds, the food, cooked at first in a converted lavatory, was famously dreadful, even by wartime standards, and Olwen, in alice band and unfortunate lipstick, could be a terrifying hostess, unceremoniously flinging out anyone to whom she took a dislike, but the ambience was remembered happily for years by Free Frenchmen. Olwen loved the cinema as much as she loved France, having been secretary of the British Film Institute when it opened in 1933, and her colleagues in the film industry came over to Piccadilly from Soho, lending much bohemian glamour. The club was described in Irwin Shaw’s novel The Young Lions as ‘merely three small rooms decked with dusty bunting with a long plank nailed on a couple of barrels that did service for a bar. In it, from time to time, you could get venison chops and Scotch salmon … It was the sort of place where all ranks could fraternize on a mildly alcoholic basis with the certain knowledge that the cold light of day would erase the military indiscretions of the previous night.’ Olwen served red Algerian wine at legal prices to her homesick guests, on Bastille Day she decorated with tricolores and the party spilled out into the street. Thanks to her film connections, the Petit Club became the place where, ‘if you knew Rita Hayworth was in town, you went to look, before the Savoy’.
The general would dine at the Ritz, the Connaught, the Savoy, or the RAC Club on Pall Mall; Gaston preferred parties at Emerald Cunard’s suite at the Dorchester or the Travellers’ Club, where he became a member, presented by Harold Nicolson. He particularly admired the staircase, a gift from Talleyrand. At a lecture given by Nicolson on Proust, he met a Parisian acquaintance, the Marquise de Ludres, at the door, and asked her, since she had known Proust so well, if she had divined his genius in their conversations. ‘If I had, I would have kept his letters, ’ she replied. He discovered several other old gratin friends, including the Princess de Polignac and Leo d’Erlanger, by whom he was introduced to the foreign minister Lord Halifax. In turn, Halifax presented him to Major ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe and his wife Baba, sister-in-law to the imprisoned Diana Mosley. Gaston’s social life was an essential means of publicizing the Free French and getting influential people on the general’s side – several dinners were organized, including one with Cecil Beaton, who photographed De Gaulle, and Noël Coward.
For all Boris’s accusations of frivolity, Gaston never lost sight of the reason for his presence in London; for all the determinedly cheerful gaiety of the Petit Club or the aristocrats in exile, France remained lost, and the future horrifically uncertain.
In London … the light was grey. We were Frenchmen and we walked about the streets of that London like so many broken toys, useless and shamefaced spectators on the rocks of a beach being covered by an irresistible tide. There was a collapse of all standards, the ground giving way under one’s feet, the unspeakable bitterness of the present, the incoherence of the imagined future.5
Leo d’Erlanger, with whom Gaston was lodging in Mayfair, later showed him the rug which had lain before the fireplace in his bedroom, worn out by long nights of pacing, as Gaston walked sleepless, ‘obsessed by the sadnesses of the present and the memories of the past’.
12
LOVE
After seven months in London, Gaston became weary of the petty, backstabbing culture at Carlton Gardens. As an experienced, professional politician, he was equally frustrated and irritated by the pomposity and incompetence of many of his colleagues who took their titles too seriously and their jobs not seriously enough. Knowing that De Gaulle made it a point of honour never to refuse a man who wished to return to active combat, he requested a transfer to Africa. He suggested that Maurice Dejean, who before the war had served as chef de cabinet to the minister for foreign affairs, replace him and in March 1941 he was delegated in turn to the command of Free French forces in East Africa. Departing from Glasgow, Gaston took an enforced six-week holiday as his ship, evading German submarines, crawled to the Cape, before crossing South Africa and Angola to Ethiopia. The port of Djibouti, which remained loyal to Pétain, gave the country its principal access to the sea and was of great strategic importance in providing a ‘ladder’ for ships to the Horn of Africa, to the south of the Suez Canal. Gaston’s aim was to bring French Somalia over to the Free French and to support the British blockade of the port, which would considerably weaken Vichy forces in the region. After visiting Aden and Cairo for negotiations with the British, he arrived in Addis Ababa on 11 June.
The resources of the Free French were very meagre. Gaston had one infantry battalion (the BM4), recently arrived from Syria, at his disposal, as well as a group of deserters from Djibouti. He set about raising two more Somali companies and distributing leaflets by air over the port to encourage French soldiers to
abandon Vichy, flying many of these missions personally. He also set up a Free French mission to Kenya under Lieutenant Henri Girard which would oversee the situation in Madagascar, La Réunion and the Comoros Islands. In November, he achieved a small success when Free French troops fought alongside the British at the taking of the Ethiopian town of Gondar.
Christmas found Gaston in pensive mood. The sparkling chill of the desert nights reminded him of ‘the time when the Ethiopian king turned with the two other magi towards the stable at Bethlehem’. The soldiers of the BM4 sang carols ‘fervently’ and ‘our hearts went out with desolate ardour towards those families and loved ones of whom, lost in this corner of Africa, we had no news. How far away France seemed in those times when victory was as yet uncertain.’ It was as well, perhaps, that news was so scarce, as learning that he had been deprived of the French nationality his father had struggled to attain would have made a wretched Christmas present. Gaston’s brother Jean-Paul, who had been able to return to France, had received a visit from an official at Louveciennes informing him that Gaston had been stripped of his citizenship as a consequence of his joining the Free French, and that all his possessions were to be sequestered awaiting confiscation. Luckily, the inspector sent to deal with the division of the brothers’ property agreed to permit Jean-Paul to act as conservator for Gaston’s share and conveniently disappeared, a gesture which made it clear where his own sympathies lay. The next summer, Jean-Paul was informed by friends that Gaston’s apartment in the Rue Bonaparte was also to be sequestered and for a month he smuggled his brother’s furniture, books and beloved bibelots out of Paris to safety.