The capture of Rouen in the west and the crossing of the Marne in the east now meant that Paris, the sacred capital, was irretrievably compromised. On 3 June, Paris was bombed for the first time and over 250 people were reported killed. By the 8th, the sound of distant cannon had become almost continuous. For the third time in seventy years, Paris began to resemble a city under siege. ‘The restaurants emptied,’ said Fabre-Luce. ‘The Ritz, abandoned by its last clients, looked like a palace in a spa on the day the baths closed down.’ The following day, G.Q.G. North-East packed up at Les Bondons and departed for less commodious lodgings at Briare, on the upper reaches of the Loire. The next night (10 June), the French radio announced: ‘The Government is compelled to leave the capital for imperative military reasons. The Prime Minister is on his way to the armies.’ At midnight, the car containing Reynaud and his new Under-Secretary of State for National Defence, General Charles de Gaulle, left for the future seat of Government at Tours. Behind them an endless stream of refugees poured out along the Boulevard Raspail. Ilya Ehrenburg, who, as a correspondent representing Hitler’s Russian ally, remained, was moved to compassion while, as he watched, ‘An old man laboriously pushed a handcart loaded with pillows on which huddled a small girl and a little dog that howled piteously.’ In contrast, de Gaulle relates how in the course of his arduous journey through the night, past a long stationary line of refugees,
suddenly a convoy of luxurious, white-tyred American cars came sweeping along the road, with militiamen on the running-boards and motor-cyclists surrounding the procession; it was the Corps Diplomatique on its way to the châteaux of Touraine.
It was dawn by the time Reynaud and de Gaulle reached Orléans.
Until this moment, the French Government had kept on repeating in Gambettaesque terms that it would fight in front of Paris and behind Paris, and only that weekend it had announced that the city had been placed ‘in a state of defence’. Every fifty yards or so down the Champs-Elysées buses had been placed diagonally, with the object of preventing German airborne troops from landing. Then, on the night of the 11th, Weygand decided to declare Paris an ‘open city’. That Paris should have capitulated without a struggle while Warsaw, London, Leningrad and Stalingrad opted to accept battle and be devastated has ever since remained a source of contention; at the time there were many loyal Frenchmen who, like André Pertinax, considered its capitulation ‘quite unprecedented’ and pointed out that ‘in 1870–1 the war had continued in the provinces only as a result of the capital’s heroic resistance’. By 11 June, the situation was such that there would, however, have been little military advantage gained in fighting for Paris, stone by beautiful stone. But psychologically, its abandonment struck a grievous blow to what remained of French morale. André Maurois recalls being warned, on 10 June, that Paris would not be defended: ‘At that moment I knew everything was over. France deprived of Paris, would become a body without a head. The war had been lost.’
As the Germans approached Paris, a drizzle of rain fell on the capital, after the long weeks of peerless weather. Early on the morning of 14 June an officer on the staff of Küchler’s Eighteenth Army, Lieutenant-Colonel Dr Hans Speidel,6 received two French officers who came under flag of truce with instructions to deliver up the capital. Later that morning troops of the German 87th Infantry Division, led by an anti-tank gun detachment which occupied the Hôtel de Ville and the Invalides, made a bloodless and orderly entry into Paris. Following in its wake just three days later, William Shirer felt an ache in the pit of his stomach at the sight of the familiar but lonely streets: ‘I wished I had not come. My German companions were in high spirits.’ Going round the Place de l’Opéra, he noted
for the first time in my life, no traffic tie-up here, no French cops shouting meaninglessly at cars hopelessly blocked. The façade of the Opera House was hidden behind stacked sandbags. The Café de la Paix seemed to be just reopening. A lone garçon was bringing out some tables and chairs. German soldiers stood on the terrace grabbing them.
The following day, he observed that there was already ‘open fraternizing’ between German troops and Parisians:
It seems funny, but every German soldier carries a camera. I saw them by the thousands to-day, photographing Notre-Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, the Invalides… Two newspapers appeared yesterday in Paris, La Victoire (as life’s irony would have it) and Le Matin… It [Le Matin] has already begun to attack England, to blame England for France’s predicament!
The day after Paris fell, Halder entered in his diary: ‘Another important day in military history!’ Verdun, the mighty fortress and spiritual symbol for which hundreds of thousands of German lives had been spent in vain in 1916, had fallen after twenty-four hours’ fighting and at a cost of less than 200 dead. For the Germans the campaign was rapidly becoming a pursuit down the highways of France. Rommel was rushing from Le Havre to Cherbourg. On the 14th Guderian entered St Dizier, to find Colonel Balck relaxing peacefully on a chair in the market-place; by the 15th the 1st Panzer had captured the old fortified town of Langres and pushed on to Gray-sur-Saône in the foothills of the Jura. The next day Guderian’s columns took Besançon, and on the 17th (his birthday) Guderian learned that his 29th Motorized Division had reached the Swiss frontier at Pontarlier. At the same time Kleist’s armour, pushing along the upper Seine, had taken Dijon. The Maginot Line – that exorbitant Great Wall – and the powerful forces7 guarding it were now turned and completely isolated from the rest of France which the Line had been built to protect. Like the triangle-player in a school orchestra waiting for his solitary bar of music, the moment had at last arrived for the Maginot Line. Attacked on all sides, little aware in their deep, sunless caverns of what was happening in the rest of France, the defenders of this white elephant of French interwar policy fought on until the very end. Not one of the major fortresses of the Line actually succumbed.
Mussolini Declares War
As if France’s cup were not full enough, the scavengers, scenting that her wounds were mortal, had moved in. Mussolini had long been champing at the bit to grab a piece of French territory, as well as a crumb of the glory. He told Marshal Badoglio: ‘I need only a few thousand dead to ensure that I have the right to sit at the peace table in the capacity of a belligerent.’ Several times President Roosevelt had interceded with the Duce, sending firmly worded pleas for Italy to remain neutral. But Hitler’s reluctance to have Mussolini as a co-belligerent (with good reason, as it later turned out) carried more weight. Finally, Mussolini could bear the postponements no longer. ‘I can’t just sit back and watch the fight,’ he exploded at the beginning of June. ‘When the war is over and victory comes I shall be left empty-handed!’ On 10 June, the day the French Government left Paris, Italy declared war on France, bringing forth from Roosevelt the angry condemnation that ‘the hand that held the dagger has stuck it in the back of his neighbour’. Italy’s act had little military consequence. After five days of fighting before the Armistice was signed, an Italian army of thirty-two divisions had barely dented France’s Alpine Front, held by General Olry and three divisions; on the Côte d’Azur the Italian invasion was held up by a French N.C.O. and seven men.8
The Soldiers: Last Resistance
For the French soldiers, the retreat seemed to go on without end:
You could catch the smell of the earth, the smell of a good June rain [wrote Hans Habe], the smell of sweating horses, the smell of the starched white blouses of the peasant girls. And then your eyes turned back to the flood of limping soldiers, trying in vain to look like men in the presence of the fleeing women. You saw children screaming desperately or still as death; officers’ cars blowing their strident horns and trying to open a path; bright cavalry uniforms on nervous, weary horses; wagons with their sleeping drivers; cannon without ammunition; the whole disordered funeral procession of a disintegrated army.
In these last terrible days, the quality of resistance was mixed. But perhaps it was almost miraculous that, under the circumstances, soldiers could
be persuaded to fight at all. At Vierzon, it is said, a tank officer wanting to defend the city was lynched by angry burghers. There were signs of mutiny in some units, while disbanded soldiers were reported to be robbing passers-by in the forests near Paris. There were also revelations that, whether through incompetence or lack of will, France had never reached right down into the depths of her military potential. As the Germans advanced, they came upon huge depots of weapons, ammunition, clothing, fuel and even new tanks which appear, inexplicably, never to have reached the armies. At the same time Spears, on his way to the Government’s final resting place at Bordeaux, wondered angrily at the fact that ‘nearly all the towns and villages I passed through were full of gaping, idle soldiers… How came it then that we were constantly told that all resources and man-power had been exhausted?’ The validity of such reproaches may never be determined. Yet amid all the adverse accounts from these days of France’s expiring agony, one episode at least will always leap forth from French history books in a blaze of glory, the kind of glory belonging almost to a past age. On 19 June, the day Pétain was asking for an armistice, Bock’s Panzers had reached Saumur on the Loire, the site of the famous cavalry school. Though still under instruction, the young cadets decided that they would not allow the school to fall without a fight. Armed only with training weapons, they held the Saumur bridges for two whole days against Panzers, until at last their ammunition ran out.
Doubtless there were other such epics of hopeless heroism, which will never now be recognized.
The Politicians: Last Resistance
While the German mobile columns were thrusting and tearing into the entrails of France, branching and re-branching like the tendrils of some rampant fungus or a nightmare man-eating plant, a bitter political struggle was being waged within Allied councils. Though forced to be more or less an impotent spectator at this stage of France’s agony, Britain’s position was a relatively simple one. Every hour that France remained in the fight delayed the German invasion of Britain by an hour – an hour in which Britain would be rearming herself to meet the attack. Should not the undefeated French armies withdraw into a Breton redoubt, where, supplied by the Royal Navy, they could hold out until, in due course, new armies from Britain, the Empire and possibly America came to their aid? Or if all hope failed in metropolitan France, would not the French Government and what remained of the army transfer itself to North Africa, there to recuperate behind the joint shield of the French and British Navies? These were the anxious hopes of Britain. But above all, Churchill and his Government were concerned at the fate of the French fleet. If this were to fall into enemy hands, it would mean the end for Britain, the end for everybody.
On 11 June, Churchill made his fourth visit to France, in response to an urgent summons from Reynaud, who had just established himself at Tours. The meeting itself was at Briare; among those present were, as usual, Pétain and Weygand, and – for the first time – General de Gaulle, whom Reynaud had brought into his Cabinet from the front line in an attempt to strengthen his position against the ‘softs’. With the exception of the calmly phlegmatic de Gaulle, Spears recalls that
The Frenchmen sat with set white faces, their eyes on the table. They looked for all the world like prisoners hauled up from some deep dungeon to hear an inevitable verdict.
Churchill at once urged that Paris be defended: ‘I emphasized the enormous absorbing power of the house-to-house defence of a great city upon an invading army.’ Weygand countered by demanding that every available British fighter squadron be thrown into the battle. ‘Here,’ he said (according to Churchill), ‘is the decisive point. Now is the decisive moment.’ No, replied Churchill, adamantly; the decisive moment would come when the Luftwaffe hurled itself against the British Isles. This can hardly have been encouraging to French ears, nor any more so Churchill’s promise that, if France could hold on until the spring of 1941, Britain would send her twenty to twenty-five fresh divisions. Spears says, mildly, that he was aware of Reynaud’s ‘suppressed irritation’ at the inadequacy of this offer. Reynaud remarked pointedly: ‘No doubt history will say the Battle of France was lost through lack of aircraft.’ ‘And through lack of tanks,’ retorted Churchill.
Weygand, having made it clear all along that he would fight his one last battle, was all defeatism: ‘I am helpless, I cannot intervene for I have no reserves… C’est la dislocation.’ He repeated what he had told the Army in his proclamation of 9 June: ‘We have come to the last quarter of an hour.’9 Weygand concluded by giving his opinion that France might soon have to ask for an armistice. According to Churchill, Reynaud snapped back: ‘That is a political question.’ Then Churchill, deeply moved by the agony of the French, erupted into a new explosion of inspired, visionary oratory, once more declaring Britain’s determination to fight to the end. Prophetically, he added:
It is possible that the Nazis may dominate Europe, but it will be a Europe in revolt, and in the end it is certain that a regime whose victories are in the main due to its machines will collapse. Machines will one day beat machines.
Then, without waiting for an answer to it, he threw in the question that was obviously uppermost in his mind: if France’s armies were to succumb, what would the French Navy do?
After the meeting ended, Churchill took aside General Georges, the French general on whom, from pre-war days, he placed the greatest reliance. He was shattered to discover that Georges was now largely in agreement with Weygand. At dinner that night, Churchill, turning in a friendly manner to Pétain, said: ‘Think back! We went through difficult times in 1918 but we got over them. We shall get over these in the same way!’ Pétain replied coldly:
In 1918, I gave you forty divisions to save the British Army. Where are the forty British divisions that we would need to save ourselves today?
The question was unanswerable. Churchill and his advisers returned to London, anticipating the worst.
The ‘Softs’ versus the ‘Hards’
Behind the scenes of the French Government, the struggle between the ‘softs’ and the ‘hards’ raged on. On one side was Reynaud, backed principally by the cold, unconquerable will of Georges Mandel, by Campinchi (Navy) and Marin (Minister of State), and now by de Gaulle, all determined to be loyal to the Anglo-French Declaration to fight to the end in France and to continue from North Africa.10 Against them were arrayed Weygand, Pétain, Baudouin, Chautemps and Ybarnegaray (the latter two Ministers of State without Portfolio) – and Hélène de Portes – all the time bringing over new recruits to their side. The case of the ‘softs’ was that it was imperative to negotiate a separate peace at once; the validity of the Anglo-French Declaration was questionable, because although (in the views of some) she had pushed France into the war, the British had not upheld their part of the bargain, by keeping back the R.A.F. in Britain and by evacuating the B.E.F.
To his song about fighting one last battle to ‘save honour’, Weygand had added a new refrain. Haunted by the precedent of the Commune (which he was almost old enough to remember), he now began expressing fears that in the wake of defeat would follow revolution. This prospect clearly seemed to afflict him more than surrender to the Germans.11 On the 12th he warned the Cabinet to remember 1917 in Russia, when ‘soldiers formed soviets in the regiments and in the armies’. He urged that Army divisions be kept intact, so as to ‘maintain order’. The following day, Weygand announced that he had received a telegram via the Ministry of the Marine, stating that ‘serious disturbances have broken out in Paris, and that Thorez has installed himself in the Élysée’. President Lebrun jumped, and the rest of the Cabinet were aghast, except for Mandel, who, as Minister of the Interior, declared with crushing certainty: ‘There are no riots in Paris and M. Thorez, M. le Président, will not sleep in your bed this evening.’ But the era of the Popular Front had planted one last paving-stone on the way to France’s downfall.
For all their disagreements during the inter-war years, Pétain was now completely at one with Weygand, both in h
is fears about ‘internal order’ and in the need to stop the fighting. Ever since Verdun, horror of the losses suffered by ‘his’ French soldiers had left an ineradicable mark upon the eighty-four-year-old marshal. There is something infinitely pathetic about Pétain in these days. Except for when any mention of the troops and their suffering would snap him to life, there were long periods when he seemed not to be aware of what was going on. Reynaud notes in his memoirs that after Weygand had delivered his account of the fighting at the Cabinet meeting of 9 June,
Marshal Pétain said nothing. He seemed to be asleep, prostrated. I questioned him. ‘Don’t you want to express an opinion, Marshal? These gentlemen are anxious to hear you.’ ‘I’ve nothing to say,’ he replied.
Listening to ‘that thin voice and cough’ on the radio, Arthur Koestler was reminded of ‘a skeleton with a chill’, and somehow it was such images of the grave and the snows of yesteryear that most struck people on encountering Pétain in these days. Making his first call on the Marshal at his office near the Invalides, Spears was struck by the complete ‘sense of unreality’ there: ‘it was as dead, as somnolent, as the chambers of a provincial lawyer on a Sunday afternoon’. On a later visit in June, the impending fall of Rouen made Spears remark to Pétain that what France needed was another Joan of Arc. The name promptly roused Pétain, who asked Spears whether he had ever read his speech about Joan of Arc (‘When was it, in 1937, ’38?’). Bringing down a bound volume of typescript from a bookshelf, he proceeded to read out the complete speech in a dull monotone. Spears was unable to recall a single sentence; but what he did remember
was the terrible sadness I felt as I watched him, a sadness now based on pity for a very old man for whom I had, till so recently, felt the deepest affection and regard. He was infinitely pathetic in his childish satisfaction as he read.
Even more saddening, Spears reflected, was the enormous influence Pétain wielded in France; what French man or woman in these days, he wondered, was not saying, ‘He will save us as he did at Verdun.’ The next day Spears warned Churchill that he was certain the Marshal would never leave France; there would be no question of his following any French Government into exile.
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