Voices from the Dark Years

by Douglas Boyd

  He had chosen the right man for a near-impossible job. In 1928, aged 44, de la Porte du Theil had grown bored with peace-time soldiering and since alternated between his chair at the War Academy and being a sort of Baden-Powell for the French Scout movement. Raised as the son of a forestry inspector, he was a great outdoorsman, first-rate hunter and good horseman. Two days later he was back in Weygand’s office, having acquired a small staff and core of NCOs, to explain his plan for dividing the unemployed conscripts of the Free Zone into regiment-sized formations of 2,000 and sending them into remote areas where they could perform useful work like logging, road-making and re-afforestation. In lieu of the obligatory military service traditional in France, each conscript on reaching the age of eighteen was to serve eight months of a healthy back-to-nature life, living under canvas until the work-teams had constructed themselves more permanent accommodation.

  When Weygand told Pétain, the marshal thought it was a wonderful way of stiffening the moral fibre of the nation’s dissolute youth by removing them from the temptations of city life and inculcating a respect for manual labour and a sense of patriotic duty against the day when military conscription was resumed. On 30 July he announced the inauguration of the Chantiers de Jeunesse, or youth work camps, placed under the aegis of the Ministry of Youth and the Family, so that the Germans would not be alarmed by thinking it a clandestine army, although privately when appointing de la Porte du Theil Commissioner-General of the Chantiers, he said unequivocally, ‘Make me an army.’ Whatever the two men took that to mean at the time, it is unlikely that either foresaw the mission ending with the Commissioner-General’s arrest and deportation by the Germans, while his enemies accused him of supplying a ready-made source of manpower for the German compulsory labour programme, despite evidence that men from the Chantiers made up less than 2.4 per cent of forced workers, partly because they had learned self-reliance and were prepared to risk the alternatives.

  This unknown general is very much a man of his time. To evaluate him is difficult today. Modelled on the army that he knew well, the Chantiers were organised in six regiments: five in the Free Zone and the other in French North Africa. In each, approximately 2,000 men were to be deployed on public works, divided into companies and platoons. To avoid military nomenclature, the largest units were called groupements and each was divided into ten groupes of 200 men each – roughly equal to a company – with each groupe divided into équipes or light platoons of fifteen men.

  The first intake eventually numbered 87,000 conscripts issued green and khaki military-style uniforms, in which they served until February 1941. Their duties were decided by unit commanders, with the proviso that they be kept busy! The day began with a salute to the colours, followed by a pep talk and the morning devoted to work, with the afternoon for physical training and technical instruction. In practice, the unwilling conscripts found pay of 1 franc and 50 centimes per day and campfire singsongs in the evening a poor compensation for money in their pockets, girls, bars and billiard halls. They made this plain by stealing, fighting, drinking when they could and sabotaging state property most of the time. The propaganda posters likening them in battledress and beret to the warlike ancient Gauls were treated with due derision, and they showed little enthusiasm for planting trees, making roads and digging ditches under quasi-military discipline. In the Occupied Zone, young men were offered a different adventure: to go and work in the Reich. Figures are unreliable, but between 40,000 and 72,000 volunteered and joined the 1.5 million foreign workers already replacing German manpower in factories and on farms.

  On 6 July all foreigners’ visas were cancelled and non-residents were made subject to travel restrictions. That month, acts of open hostility to the occupation forces were swiftly punished to serve as lessons to the general population. In Rouen, Épinal and Royenne lone protesters cut German telephone lines and were executed by firing squad. The only violence in Bordeaux came when a distraught Polish refugee shook his fist at a military band, for which he too was shot on 27 August.

  By then, Baboushka’s family had filled their villa with refugees to avoid it being requisitioned when the first German troops, watched by silent crowds wondering what was going to happen next. Renée and her mother told the children not to look at the Germans, but just pretend they were not there. It was all rather English. François Mauriac put it more poetically. ‘Have eyes that see nothing,’ he advised his compatriots. However, it was very hard for a Frenchwoman not to thank a polite, smiling soldier who lifted her heavy suitcase onto a train, as it was for Renée to refuse a seat on a bus when a German politely stood up for her.

  The empty de Rothschild villa next door to the de Monbrisons’ was requisitioned for a German general and his staff. Renée’s sons were fascinated by the two armed sentries goose-stepping at the bottom of their driveway, day and night. A thirsty sentry who asked them to sneak him a bottle of lemonade from a nearby shop rewarded the boys with cigarettes. When their mother found out, they were sent to bed without supper.

  They watched an anti-submarine net being strung from the beach below their villa to Cap Ferret on the far side of the entrance to Arcachon lagoon. Thus protected, the Wehrmacht rehearsed Fall Seelöwe or Operation Sealion, its planned landing in Britain. Soldiers were pushed overboard from landing barges to test how well they could swim with full pack and weapons and trucks were driven ashore towing a dozen bicycle-soldiers on a rope, most of whom fell off in the soft sand. Forbidden to have anything to do with the unwelcome neighbours, the boys took a dangerous pleasure in hiding by the roadside and pelting the last trucks of German convoys with pine cones.6

  Motor fuel becoming unobtainable for civilians, bicycles came into their own. Like many others, Renée rarely went out without a trailer tied behind her bike – not that there was very much to buy, apart from locally caught fish, artichokes, root vegetables and horse meat once a month. Bread rationing was already in force. Coupons for 100g per person were usable only on the date printed on them, to prevent stockpiling.

  People spent hours every day in the long queues outside the few bakeries and food stores still open. The problem at this early date was not so much shortage of food as disruption to food production and distribution caused by 8 million refugees being far from home, butchers, bakers and other shopkeepers among them. In many areas under no military threat, the population had been ordered to leave their homes, taking only three day’s provisions with them. In their deserted villages and towns it was often the German army that replaced the French infrastructure by setting up a soup kitchen or by distributing bread for stay-at-homes and returnees. German railwaymen were already driving trains that enabled some refugees to return home. On the bandstands in public parks, Wehrmacht musicians played afternoon concerts to calm the population. On the hoardings, the tattered general mobilisation notices from the previous September and later posters warning of a mythical fifth column stabbing the army in the back were swiftly covered by new ones showing a valiant Wehrmacht soldier holding a grateful small child in his arms above the message: ‘Abandoned by your leaders, put your trust in the German soldier!’7

  That there were rapes and some armed robberies was inevitable with over a million armed men in areas populated by old men, women and children. In some places, soldiers in German uniform demanded food and drink at the point of a gun when their own supplies had run out, but this tended to occur in the country and small villages. In the towns policed by the Feldgendarmerie they were on their best behaviour and insisted on paying for what they wanted. True, they used German money, but from 20 June onwards that was declared legal tender at the very favourable rate of exchange imposed by Berlin: one Reichsmark equalled 20 francs. Indeed, the Wehrmacht was mostly so well behaved that many bewildered French refugees wondered why they had been ordered by the authorities to flee their distant homes.

  A rigid curfew was imposed from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. – the start being put back on 7 July to 11 p.m. and midnight in November as a reward for the po
pulation’s good behaviour. It was decreed that householders were now responsible for cleaning the space in front of their houses, as in Germany. Similarly, peasants must clear weeds and tidy up their farms. Clocks must be put forward an hour, to Berlin time. The French tricolore flag must be removed from town halls and war memorials. The first wave of German orders seemed a small price to pay for the end of the bloodshed to a population fed up with the vacillations and ineptitude of their own authorities and elected representatives. And Marshal Pétain was the hero of the hour, for it was he who had achieved this miracle.

  Bread rationing tickets.

  NOTES

  1. Quoted in Burrin, Living with Defeat, p. 47.

  2. Most of the 8 million Occitan-speakers, 1.4 million Bretons, 400,000 Corsicans, 200,000 Flemings, 200,000 Catalans and 150,000 Basques also spoke French. In a 1931 survey in Alsace, 700,000 had declared themselves German-speaking, 800,000 were bilingual and 200,000 spoke only French. See Burrin, Living with Defeat, p. 49.

  3. Freeman and Cooper, Road to Bordeaux, p. 315.

  4. Madame Cahen D’Anvers, Baboushka Remembers (privately printed, 1972), pp. 186–94.

  5. G. and J.-R. Ragache, La Vie des Ecrivains et des Artistes sous l’Occupation (Paris: Hachette, 1988), p.32.

  6. R. de Monbrison, Memoirs, unpub. MS.

  7. Populations abandonnées, confiez-vous au sol dat allemand!

  5

  BEHOLD THE MAN!

  What kind of man was Philippe Pétain, whose name became a synonym for cruelty and collaboration in the worst degree?

  A career soldier who never expected to become a general, let alone head of state, he was born in April 1856 into a family of farmers a few kilometres from Béthune in northern France. Admitted to the military academy of St-Cyr after attending the village school and a religious secondary school, he was an outstanding cadet. Commissioned second-lieutenant in an Alpine regiment, he was popular with his men but not his superiors because of an inability to keep his mouth shut when disagreeing with them – a trait that has blighted the career of many a peacetime soldier. While an instructor at St-Cyr, Pétain opposed the nineteenth-century obsession with offensive operations at any cost, arguing that a commander must possess superior fire-power before launching an attack and that a well-organised defence to wear the enemy down was often a better course.

  Thus, advancement came his way slowly. In 1914 he was a handsome blue-eyed unmarried 58-year-old colonel stationed in Arras with a record that even his hagiographical biography by General Laure described as distinctly below average. On the point of resigning his commission from sheer frustration when war broke out, Pétain was promoted general on the strength of commanding at Guise in 1914 one of the few successful operations against the invading armies of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Given command of 6th Division and then 33rd Corps, he distinguished himself again at Artois by the use of massive artillery barrages to reduce the horrific scale of casualties that his fellow-generals thought acceptable. Promoted to command 2nd Army for the ‘big push’ in Champagne during September 1915, he failed to break the German line, but was called on six months later to stem the attack under Crown Prince Wilhelm on the crucial fortress-city of Verdun. On his appointment, the situation was regarded as hopeless, but he reorganised the front, the transport system and the disposition of artillery, inspiring his demoralised troops. Unashamed to show his grief at the sight of the casualties, he earned at Verdun a reputation for humane and far-sighted generalship.

  In June 1917 after the widespread mutinies following the ill-considered offensives of General Nivelle, which cost hundreds of thousands of lives to no purpose, Pétain’s success at Verdun and his popularity with the troops resulted in him replacing Nivelle as Commander-in-Chief of all French armies. His first problem was not the enemy, but the low morale of the men under his command. A brutal series of executions before his appointment, although intended to halt the widespread mutinies, had succeeded only in reducing morale even further. Pétain’s revolutionarily modern method was to reduce punishments and reward good conduct and bravery, even allowing men in the ranks to recommend their own comrades for the Croix de Guerre.

  Conscripts who had been fighting for three years in the trenches without seeing their families were astonished to be given leave passes. They enjoyed regular rest periods out of the line – and better food. The latter he achieved by random visits to other ranks’ canteens, where he startled his aides-de-camp by sampling the fare personally and commenting on it frankly. In August and October 1917 at Verdun and Malmaison Pétain again made a name for himself by using enormous bombardments to save his men’s lives, and finished the war as France’s most respected soldier since Napoleon. It had taken him forty years to rise from second lieutenant to colonel; from there to Marshal of France took only four. His rise was all the more spectacular because the majority of his fellow generals were discredited and it seemed to the nation that he was the only one who had never been wrong since 1914.

  At the age of 62, he was popular enough to enter politics, but chose to do what great Roman generals had done, retiring to a farm to occupy himself with husbandry while awaiting his country’s call. It came in 1926, when he was sent to Morocco to suppress the revolt against French colonial domination led by Abd el-Krim. Inheriting the chair of his deceased rival Marshal Foch at the Académie Française on 22 January 1931, he was hailed by the poet Paul Valéry as the man who had gone to war in 1914 at the head of 6,000 men and had 3 million under his command by 1918. However, outside the ivory tower of the Academy lay the smokeless factory chimneys and the hunger marches of the Depression years. After nationwide strikes and riots in 1934, it was Pétain’s presence in the unstable government of Gaston Doumergue that was largely responsible for the re-establishment of public order: people trusted the Saviour of Verdun to bring in the reforms they wanted.

  His last public office in the 1930s was as ambassador to Spain. Aged 81 on appointment, the old soldier charged with opening diplomatic relations with Franco’s government was so widely respected that even the caudillo wept with emotion on hearing of his appointment. However, Pétain did not have the political sense it takes to be a diplomat and was easily duped into allowing himself to be photographed with German members of the Condor Legion or warmly shaking the hand of Hitler’s ambassador von Stohrer. Even after the declaration of war with Germany in 1939, Pétain was again photographed apparently reviewing swastika-badged German flagbearers at the reinterment of Falange founder José Antonio Primo de Rivera in the Escurial. Goebbels’ propaganda machine naturally made the most of these photo opportunities before Pétain was recalled by Reynaud on 16 May 1940.

  If that was the public Pétain, what was the private man?

  All the world loves a lover, and France more so than most countries. Pétain had a great love affair, which endeared him to many women, who admired him for saving the lives of their menfolk at Verdun. The long affair began in 1881 at Menton. Aged 25, Second Lieutenant Pétain dandled 4-year-old Eugénie Hardon on his knee – and fell in love with her. In the guise of family friend, he consoled young Ninie on the loss of her mother and then her father. On his regular visits to the bereaved Hardon household, he watched her grow from an enchanting child into a beautiful, elfin-faced young woman, looking uncommonly like Leslie Caron in the film version of Colette’s Gigi. The perfect gentleman, Philippe Pétain bided his time, waiting until 1901 when she was 24 and he 45. Such age gaps were neither uncommon at the time, nor disapproved of. Yet when the nervous suitor proposed marriage, he was rejected by Eugenie’s guardians because of his poor military prospects. Two years later, she married and had a son.

  The marriage failing, Eugénie became aware of Pétain’s amour de loin expressed in passionate love letters. Despite his enormous responsibilities, Pétain wrote to her every single day throughout the First World War, his letters revealing a tortured, jealous admirer. On the threshold of the greatest carnage the world had known, he wrote to her on a ruled signal pad dated 21 A
ugust 1914: ‘I face a great battle without regret or apprehension for I have already offered my life to my country, but the physical suffering ahead is as nothing compared with the spiritual torture you cause me.’1 In April 1916 he wrote to her, not of guns and glory but of a lovers’ fantasy tryst: the two of them alone ‘with just some books for company and a few good friends, who do not include your old sweethearts or mine’.2

  As the war progressed it was Eugénie’s turn to be jealous of the many beautiful women pursuing France’s great hero. Jealous of each other, now bitter, now loving, they were together when Joffre called Pétain to command the army at Verdun. Reluctantly he tore himself away from Ninie to fulfil his destiny. It was not until 1920 that the lovers could get married: he now 64 and she 43, a fashionable woman of beauty, poise and presence. Not in the high society of Paris, but in the bucolic setting of Villeneuve-Loubet in the Alpes Maritimes between Nice and Antibes, Pétain returned to his roots – becoming expert in raising chickens and rabbits, growing vegetables and pruning vines.

  The rural idyll, interrupted by his suppression of the Abd el-Krim revolt in Morocco, ended for good when Pétain was sent to Madrid. When he was recalled by Reynaud in May 1940 to serve in the cabinet, Eugénie did not accompany him to Paris, having no place in his political life. However, she came to take up her duties at his side when the government moved from Bordeaux to Clermont-Ferrand and then to Vichy. She stayed loyally with him from then on, and accompanied him by choice on 20 August 1944 when the SS drove the ageing marshal into exile on the other side of the Rhine. She was still with him on his return via Switzerland in 1945 to face trial and a sentence of death. Briefly imprisoned with him, she was released, but showed both dignity and courage in standing by one of the two most vilified men in France – Laval was the other. After the commutation of Pétain’s death sentence immediately after its pronouncement in August 1945, she moved to the bleak Ile d’Yeu in the Bay of Biscay, where he was imprisoned, and stayed there near the prison until his death in July 1951 at the age of 95.