by John Kelly
Whatever the reason, the order confronted Gort with a decision. Should he take advantage of the order and fall back to Dunkirk? Or should he honor his pledge to the French and provide two BEF divisions for a revised version of the Weygand plan? On the afternoon of the twenty-fifth, a firefight near Menen, a Belgian town on the French border, settled the issue. A German map captured in the fight indicated that the Führer order would be lifted the following morning, the twenty-sixth, and that an attempt would be made to close the road to Dunkirk. Acting on his own recognizance, at six thirty on the evening of the twenty-fifth, Gort ordered the BEF units in the northern pocket to begin falling back to the port.
Half an hour after Gort issued the order, the French War Committee convened for its second session of the day; this time the meeting was held in a half-lit Élysée Palace, whose gloomy atmosphere reminded one committee member of a “spa on the day the baths shut down.” Except for the occasional whoosh of an automobile on the Avenue de Marigny, the twilight city outside the palace was quiet. When General Weygand rose to open the meeting, hope got up and left the room. Straightening his young man’s body to its full height, the general said in an old man’s voice, “It is my duty to prepare for the worst.” Then Weygand described the catastrophic sequence of events about to befall France. The catastrophe would commence with the annihilation of the Allied pocket in the North and end with the destruction of the last large body of intact French troops, the forty-three to fifty divisions (estimates vary) holding the Somme–Aisne line south of the pocket. They would be obliterated by a German force “three times their own strength” (150 divisions). Facts must be faced, Weygand told the committee: All chance of victory or even of survival has passed. Now France fights only for reputation. It would be the duty of the army “to fight until the [Somme–Aisne] line [is] completely broken in order to save our honor.”
Should the national government retreat to the provinces if the Germans drive on Paris? Reynaud asked.
No, said Weygand, who had no idea he had just stepped into a trap. The answer confirmed Reynaud’s suspicion that the general’s sudden fondness for a Roman ending—for days Weygand had been urging the government to emulate the Roman Senate, which had continued to deliberate when the barbarians reached the gates of Rome—was a ruse. If the government remained in Paris as Weygand wanted, once the city was occupied, the ministers would have no alternative but to sign an armistice, and that would give Weygand what he wanted—a quick end to the war—and what he perhaps wanted even more: a quick end in which no blame attached to his name.
Albert Lebrun, the president of the French Republic, also had a question. Would it not be better for France to initiate talks now, while its army and navy still existed? Before Weygand had a chance to reply, Reynaud answered Lebrun. The decision to leave the war was not up to France alone, he said. The agreement that Britain and France signed the previous March required each party to get the other’s permission before seeking a separate armistice.
Now it was Weygand’s turn to interrupt. Yes, he told Lebrun. France would have to consult England before accepting a German peace offer, but, faced with the threat of invasion and the loss of the BEF, he believed that London would be prepared to accept—perhaps even to solicit—a German peace offer.
It was Pétain’s turn next.
After spending some time with the marshal earlier in the day, Spears had pronounced Pétain “dead in the sense that a figure that gives no impression of being alive can be said to be dead.” That was a serious misjudgment. Pétain might be old, but he was aware of the power his name carried. To millions of his countrymen, the name Pétain was inseparable from the name Verdun, and that association gave his word a unique weight, especially when giving voice to a feeling shared by the French nation as he was that night. Pétain’s theme was that perennial French crowd-pleaser “perfidious Albion.” He said each ally’s obligation under the March treaty should be commensurate with each one’s contribution to the war, and he left his colleagues to do the math. France had begun the war with more than ninety divisions in the line; Britain, with the promise to deliver ten divisions to the Western Front within nine months.
César Campinchi, the minister of the navy and a little terrier of a man, seemed appalled by Pétain’s cynicism. “A peace treaty must never be signed by France without a previous agreement with England.” Brave words, but they would have been braver still had not Campinchi immediately walked them back. Of course, he said, a new government might not feel bound by the no-separate-peace pledge signed by the present government. Later in the meeting the observations of General Joseph Vuillemin, chief of the French Air Staff, set off a brief round of British-bashing. Some of the complaints voiced could be put down to vindictiveness; ever since the breakthrough on the Meuse, the British had been vocal in their criticism of the French Army and the French soldier—but some of the criticism directed at Britain was not only justified but echoed the views of officials far more sympathetic to Britain than Vuillemin, Pétain, and Weygand. Among them was Lord Davies, a former parliamentary secretary to Lloyd George, who said, “Things must go better now . . . after all we’ve made every bloody mistake that can be made,” and the Canadian diplomat William Patterson, who told a colleague, “If I ever have to go through another war, let it not be with the English—their slowness drives me mad.” Weygand’s observation about France fighting a 1939 German army with 1918 methods was also true for Britain. In the kind of war Germany was waging, both Allies were out of their depth.
Before the committee dissolved at 9:30 p.m., it was decided that Reynaud should fly to London the next day to talk to Churchill, but members of the war committee left the Élysée Palace with different ideas of what Reynaud planned to tell the prime minister. Paul Baudouin, Reynaud’s chef de cabinet, imagined he would ask Churchill to release France from the no-separate-peace agreement. Generals Weygand and Guillemin imagined that the premier would demand an increase in British military aid. They were wrong. Reynaud already knew what he wanted to talk to Churchill about, and it was not any of those things.
* * *
One night toward the end of the war General Alan Brooke, who had commanded the BEF’s Second Corps in May 1940, heard Churchill give a disquisition on the human brain’s capacity to “register catastrophe”; the prime minister likened the brain’s absorption ability to that “of a three-inch pipe in a flood.” The “pipe will go on passing water through under pressure, but when a flood comes, the water flows over [and around] the pipe whilst [it] goes on handling its three inches.” Similarly, said Churchill, “the human brain will register emotions up to its three-inch limit; additional emotions flow past unregistered.” Listening to the disquisition, Brooke was brought back to May 25, 1940, the day he read a translated version of the captured German battle plan and the day the Luftwaffe bombed the mental hospital in Armentières, a French town near the Belgian border. When Brooke arrived in Armentières at about five that afternoon, the town looked like a scene from the medieval Dance of Death. Except instead of smiling skeletons, there were smiling “lunatics in brown corduroy suits . . . grinning at one another with a flow of saliva running from the corner of their mouths and dripping noses.” After a bitter day of fighting, bombarded by rumors of every description, flooded by refugees, the “lunatics . . . were the last straw.” “Had it not been that . . . one’s senses were numbed with the magnitude of the catastrophe . . . the situation would have been unbearable,” Brooke wrote later.
On the evening of the twenty-fifth, some of the German units on the Belgian side of the Allied pocket were close enough to Dunkirk to see the Leughenaer and the other town landmarks. But Armentières, on the French side of the pocket, was part of an archipelago created by the fortunes of war. It sat at the southern end of a forty-mile corridor that was one of the last open escape routes to Dunkirk. Farther up the corridor, retreating French and British troops shared the roads with “lame women suffering from sore feet, small children . . . hugging their
dolls, and . . . the old and maimed struggling along.” Still farther up the corridor, the roadside cafés were filled with drunken Belgian soldiers who had “given up any idea of fighting.” Before retiring on the night of the twenty-fifth, Churchill, aware that General Time was fighting on the German side at Dunkirk, issued a final order to Gort: “March north to the coast in battle order.”
* * *
Earlier on the twenty-fifth, near Whitehall, the American journalist Edward R. Murrow saw a young woman “crying very quietly” at a bus stop. There were several other people at the stop, but the woman was either indifferent or oblivious to them. “She didn’t even bother to brush her tears away,” Murrow noticed. When he turned the corner, the woman was still weeping, and the other passengers were staring into the street. Abrupt changes in public opinion are uncommon, but on May 25, through some mysterious human instinct, millions of individual Britons seemed to collectively focus on the “smash up” that Margery Allingham had written about. Murrow sensed the change, as did the New Yorker correspondent Mollie Panter Downes. The London that Panter Downes described on the twenty-fifth was not as bleak as Paris, but the shops and stores were empty, the streets half empty, and everyone seemed gripped by the “horrifying sense of living the same old nightmare again.” Like Murrow, Panter Downes also had an eye for the telling detail. That year, she told New Yorker readers, the tulips outside Buckingham Palace were “the color of blood.” The Mass Observation report for May 25 confirmed what was apparent on the streets that afternoon: “On the whole, the quality of optimism has violently declined and the quality of pessimism deepened. The public mind is in a chaotic condition and ready to be plunged into the depths of an utterly bewildered, shocked, almost unbelieving dismay. The whole structure of national belief would seem to be rocking gently.” Home Intelligence, the Ministry of Information’s survey unit, picked up many of the same changes but described them in more temperate language. “Depression is quite definitely up. . . . Even working class men, [hitherto] the strongest optimists, are often qualifying their remarks with slight suspicion or doubt about the way things are developing. . . . Morale among women is . . . considerably lower than that of men.” Perhaps sensing this, Mrs. Robert Noble, a columnist for the Essex Newsman, urged her female readers toward “cheerfulness and practical common sense . . . two qualities that the home front cannot do without.”
The sharp decline in morale had many sources. Every night now, the French coast was flashing on and off like a neon sign as German and French gunners exchanged rounds. And everyone knew that the bombers would be coming soon. “It was just like expecting the end of the world,” wrote the historian Arnold Toynbee. “In a few minutes the clock was going to stop and life as we have known it was coming to an end.” A hundred generations had passed since England had last experienced invasion, but now people awoke each morning in expectation: Would the wireless announce a landing, a parachute assault? Would the bombers be over today? “The threat to this island grows nearer and nearer,” said the Daily Express. Warned the Daily Mail: “If Hitler consolidates his hold on the Channel Ports, the onslaught on these shores will be at hand.” Headlines such as AMERICANS, GO HOME also made people feel downhearted and isolated.
In The End of the Affair, Graham Greene described the summer of 1940 as “sweet with the smell of doom.” For most people, probably nothing contributed more to that sense of doom than the reappearance of that palmist of the Great War, the newspaper lists of the dead and missing. The Times of London’s list for May 25 included a young American, twenty-one-year-old RAF sergeant Alfred Cuthbert Thompson, of Bayonne, New Jersey. The paper also noted that the young men who would be lining up to register for conscription that day belonged to the 1912 to 1920 class. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, on May 25 the Daily Express published an article titled “Go home, hint to British film exiles in America.” Among the prominent British actors and directors the Express accused of sitting out the war in Hollywood were Cary Grant and Errol Flynn, both thirty-one, prime fighting age; Laurence Olivier, thirty-three; Ray Milland, thirty-five; and Alfred Hitchcock, thirty-nine.
In an analysis of morale published on June 1, Mass Observation would note that raw fear alone was insufficient to explain the emotional volatility and confusion of the previous two weeks. Another factor was at work, one that MO had touched on in earlier reports: the collapse of a belief system that in previous crises had steadied public opinion. Things formerly taken for granted—Britain always won the final battle; God was on Britain’s side; Britain fights with strong allies—could no longer be taken for granted. In the coming weeks, MO noted, the great task for Churchill and his government would be to create a new national narrative, one that inspired courage and hope but was also plausible. The narrative had to be forthright in acknowledging the dangers facing the country and it had to provide a credible explanation of how the dangers would be met and overcome.
There could be no more talk of “Peace in our time” or “Hitler missed the bus.” The public had had enough of fairy tales.
CHAPTER NINE
THE ITALIAN APPROACH
On Sunday morning, May 26, William Shirer, the Berlin correspondent for CBS News, visited a company of German engineers outside Lille, a French city on the southern side of the Allied pocket. Lille had seen some of the bitterest fighting of the campaign, but when Shirer arrived that morning, the engineers, who were scheduled to lay a pontoon bridge under fire in a few minutes, were lying on the edge of a wood reading Western Front, the German army newspaper. Shirer was stunned. Except for the dirty jokes and the rumbling of passing ambulances, the scene was as idyllic as any he remembered from his Midwestern boyhood. He took out his notebook and wrote: “Morale of German troops fantastic.”
The most charitable thing that can be said about the mood in London that Sunday morning is that after weeks of brilliant weather, nature had finally produced a day in tune with the national temper. The rain started a little after 5:00 a.m., and it was still raining at 7:00 a.m. when church bells began pealing across the city. A little later that morning, Harold Nicolson turned on the BBC to hear the war news. When it was over, he sat down and wrote his wife a letter. The Nicolsons were planning to commit suicide when the Germans invaded, and, as invasion now appeared imminent, Nicolson felt it was time to begin thinking about the practical aspects of the suicide pact. “You really ought to have a ‘bare bodkin’ [poison pill] handy so that you can take your quietus when necessary,” he told his wife. “I shall have one also. I am not in the least afraid of such a sudden and honorable death. . . . But how can we find a bodkin which [works] quickly and . . . is easily portable? I shall ask my doctor friends.”
Despite the rain, the city below Nicolson’s rooms at 4 King’s Bench Park was up early that morning. Across the empire, May 26 had been designated National Prayer Day. In India, tens of thousands of His Majesty’s Hindu and “Mohammedan” subjects had gathered in temples and mosques. In Australia, “overflow congregations” had attended services in Sydney and Melbourne; and in New Zealand, a crowd of three thousand, including the prime minister and his cabinet, had attended a service at Wellington town hall. And as Sunday morning made its way westward across the globe, there were prayer services in British Columbia, Manitoba, the Canadian Arctic, and at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York.
In London, the churches and synagogues were particularly full. By 9:00 a.m., the streets in Whitehall had disappeared under a canopy of dripping umbrellas, and under the umbrellas marched representatives of every segment of British society: City stockbrokers in black bowlers; plump, pink-cheeked Colonel Blimps in uniforms “gorgeous with medals”; gossipy East End housewives; unemployed West End actors (four plays had closed and two openings had been canceled in the past week); shop girls in cheap Woolworth’s dresses; repentant ex-Mosleyites (their former leader, the fascist Oswald Mosley, had been arrested on May 23); pacifists from the Peace Pledge Union; society women in bellboy hats, their minds moving restl
essly back and forth between the national crisis and lunch at the Dorchester or Carleton that afternoon; and Great War veterans, wondering why and how it had all gone so wrong so quickly.
An hour before the start of the Westminster Abbey service, the war cabinet convened for a morning session. Except for the twenty-five-foot-long cabinet table, the only notable decoration in the sparsely furnished cabinet room was the portrait of Robert Walpole, an eighteenth-century statesman, hanging over the fireplace. On this morning, as on every other morning for the past hundred or so years, Walpole was gazing across the room, at the plane trees in St. James Park. Below him, Churchill was briefing the cabinet on the overnight news. Spears had cabled a depressing account of Major Lavelle’s report, rumors were circulating of a Belgian surrender, and Reynaud was flying over for lunch that afternoon, probably to say that France was leaving the war. Churchill’s final announcement produced a protest from Cyril Newall, the chief of the Air Staff. Newall could not understand why the prime minister had commissioned another paper on Britain’s prospects in the event of a French surrender.