The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  On Saturday, May 11th, the day after the Germans invaded Holland and Belgium, I had a letter from Jean-Pierre, a corporal in one of the two French armored divisions, which were created after the Polish campaign. They were good divisions, and Jean-Pierre had no way of knowing that the Germans had six times as many. “The real rough-house is about to begin,” he wrote. “So much the better! It will be like bursting an abscess.” Jean-Pierre, whose parents were my oldest friends in France, was a strong, quiet boy who in civil life had been a draughtsman in an automobile factory. He liked to play ice hockey and collect marine algae. He had not wanted a soft job in a factory during the war because he did not want to be considered a coward.

  On the same morning I had a telephone conversation with another friend of mine, Captain de Sombreuil, who had just arrived from Alsace on furlough. Upon reaching the Gare de l’Est, he had learned that all furloughs were cancelled, so he was going back by the next train. He called me up to say that he wouldn’t be able to go to the races at Auteuil with me as he had planned. “It’s good that it’s starting at last,” he said. “We can beat the Boches and have it over with by autumn.”

  In the afternoon I went to Auteuil alone. I watched a horse belonging to Senator Hennessy, the cognac man, win the Prix Wild Monarch for three-year-old hurdlers. The track was crowded with people whose main preoccupations seemed to be the new three-year-olds and the new fashions being worn by the women. That day the Germans were taking Arnhem and Maastricht in Holland and attacking Rotterdam with parachutists. Nobody worried much. Everyone was eager principally to know whether French troops had yet made contact with the enemy. “The Boches have business with somebody their own size now!” they said pugnaciously. “They will see we are not Poles or Norwegians!” It was conceivable, of course, that the Germans would win a few victories, but it would be a long war, like the last one. All France, hypnotized by 1918, still thought in terms of concentrated artillery preparations, followed by short advances and then, probably, by counterattacks. Even if the Allied troops should fail to save Holland, they would join the Belgians in holding the supposedly magnificent fortified line of the Albert Canal. At worst, the armies could fall back to the Franco-Belgian frontier, where, the newspapers had been proclaiming since September, there was a defensive system practically as strong as the Maginot Line. Confidence was a duty. The advertising department of the Magasins du Louvre discovered another duty for France. The store’s slogan was “Madame, it is your duty to be elegant!” “They shall not pass” was considered vieux jeu and hysterical. The optimistic do-nothingism of the Chamberlain and Daladier regimes was, for millions of people, the new patriotism. Ten days before the war began in May, Alfred Duff Cooper told the Paris American Club, “We have found a new way to make war—without sacrificing human lives.”

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  The news of the break-through at Sedan, which reached Paris on the fifth day of the offensive, was, for a few Parisians who were both pessimistic and analytical, the beginning of fear. But it happened so quickly, so casually, as presented in the communiqués, that the unreflective didn’t take it seriously. The Belgian refugees began to arrive in Paris a few days after the fighting started. The great, sleek cars of the de-luxe refugees came first. The bicycle refugees arrived soon after. Slick-haired, sullen young men wearing pullover sweaters shot out of the darkness with terrifying, silent speed. They had the air of conquerors rather than of fugitives. Many of them undoubtedly were German spies. Ordinary destitute refugees arrived later by train and as extra riders on trucks. Nothing else happened at first to change the daily life of the town.

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  Tuesday evening, May 14th, I climbed the hill of Montmartre to the Rue Gabrielle to visit Jean-Pierre’s parents. Henri, Jean-Pierre’s father, had long limbs and sad eyes; he combined the frame of a high jumper and the mustaches of a Napoleonic grenadier. He was a good Catholic, and by birth and training he belonged to the wealthier bourgeoisie. By temperament, which he had never been allowed to indulge, he was a bohemian. A long struggle to succeed in business, which he secretly detested, had ended in a defeat just short of total. When war was declared, he was working for a firm of textile stylists whose customers were chiefly foreign mills. Since September, business had fallen off drastically and Henri had had nothing to do except drop in once in a while to keep up the firm’s desultory correspondence. Henri spoke English, German, and Dutch in addition to French, and sometimes sang in a deep voice which sounded like a good but slightly flawed ’cello. He often said that he was happy to be living, at last, high on Montmartre, just under Sacré-Cœur. His wife, Eglée, would never have permitted him to live there for any reason less compelling than poverty. Eglée, before her marriage to Henri, had been a buyer in a department store. Recently she had devised a muslin money belt for soldiers to wear under their shirts. She worked an average of sixteen hours a day, making the belts with a frantic dexterity, but about once a fortnight she got so exhausted that she had to stay in bed for two or three days. She had placed the belts in several of the department stores, but her profit was small. Eglée and Henri were both about sixty years old. For thirty-five years Henri had pretended to like trade in order to hold his wife’s respect, and Eglée had pretended to loathe trade in order to hold Henri’s affection. Neither had succeeded in deceiving the other. He brooded, she scolded, he drank a little, they quarrelled incessantly, and they loved each other more than any two people I have ever known.

  As I came into their apartment Tuesday night, Eglée was saying she felt sure Jean-Pierre was dead. Henri said that was nonsense. She said he was an unfeeling parent. Henri became angry and silent. Then he said that often, when he was at Verdun, Eglée had not heard from him for a week at a time. She said that Henri was always talking about Verdun and belittling “Jean-Pierre’s war.” “To think that after these years of preparing to avoid the old mistakes,” Henri said, “the Germans are now eighty miles from us. If they get to Paris, it’s all over.” Eglée said he was a defeatist to mention such an eventuality. He said, “I am not a defeatist. I am an old soldier and also an old travelling man, and I know how near they are to Paris.” I tried to console him by saying that the Dutch, at any rate, were fighting better than anyone had expected. Henri had cousins in Holland. Eglée said the Dutch were Boches and would before long prove it.

  The next morning there was a radio announcement that the Dutch had surrendered in Europe but were going to continue the war in the East Indies. In the afternoon, some of the American correspondents, including myself, went to the Netherlands Legation to meet Mynheer Van Kleffens, the Netherlands Minister for Foreign Affairs, who had arrived from London to explain the Dutch decision. Van Kleffens, accompanied by the Netherlands Minister to France and the Netherlands Minister for National Defence, received us and the journalists of other neutral countries in the Legation garden. While we were talking, sadly and quietly, among the trees, the French were losing the war. On that Wednesday, May 15th, the Germans made the deep incision which a few days later was to split the Allied armies. The Foreign Minister, a blond, long-faced man, had a pet phrase which he repeated many times, as a man does when he is too tired to think of new forms for his thought. “The Germans tried this,” he would say, recounting some particular method of the German attack, and then he would add, “It failed.” “It failed,” he would say, and again, “It failed”—until you thought he was talking of a long, victorious Dutch resistance—and then finally, “But to fight longer was hopeless.” “We will fight on” was another recurrent phrase. When we asked him whether the Dutch had any planes left to fight with, he said, “No. We had fifty bombers. The last one flew off and dropped its last bomb and never returned.”

  Holland, with one-tenth the population of Germany but with several times the wealth per capita, had presented fifty bombers against five thousand. It had been comfortable to believe in neutrality, and cheap. Norway, with the fourth largest merchant marine in the world, had not built the few good light cruisers
and destroyers which might have barred the weak German navy from its ports. France herself had economized on the Maginot Line, had decided it was too expensive to extend the fortifications from Luxembourg to the sea. The democracies had all been comfortable and fond of money. Thinking of the United States, I was uneasy.

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  The first panic of the war hit Paris Thursday, May 16th. It affected, however, only the most highly sensitized layers of the population: the correspondents, the American and British war-charity workers, and the French politicians. In Paris, because of censorship, news of disaster always arrived unofficially and twenty-four hours late. On the evening of the catastrophic May 15th, even the neurotic clientele of the Ritz and Crillon bars had been calm. But on Thursday people began telling you about Germans at Meaux and south of Soissons, points the Germans didn’t actually reach until over three weeks later. There was a run on the Paris branch of the Guaranty Trust Company by American depositors. I lunched in a little restaurant I frequently went to on the Rue Ste.-Anne, and after the meal, M. Bisque, the proprietor, suggested that we go to the Gare du Nord to see the refugees. M. Bisque cried easily. Like most fine cooks, he was emotional and a heavy drinker. He had a long nose like a woodcock and a mustache which had been steamed over cookpots until it hung lifeless from his lip. Since my arrival in France in October he had taken me periodically on his buying trips to the markets so that I could see the Germans weren’t starving Paris. On these trips we would carry a number of baskets and, as we filled one after another with oysters, artichokes, or pheasants, we would leave them at a series of bars where we stopped for a drink of apple brandy. The theory was that when we had completed our round of the markets we would circle back on our course, picking up the baskets, and thus avoid a lot of useless carrying. It worked all right when we could remember the bars where we had left the various things, but sometimes we couldn’t, and on such occasions M. Bisque would cry that restauration was a cursed métier, and that if the government would permit he would take up his old rifle and leave for the front. But they would have to let him wear horizon blue; he could not stand the sight of khaki because it reminded him of the English. “They say the English are very brave at sea,” he would say, winking slowly, “but who knows? We don’t see them, eh?”

  The trip to the Gare du Nord was solemn. M. Bisque dragged me to see various mothers sitting on rolls of bedding and surrounded by miauling children; his eyes would water, and he would offer a child a two-franc piece, and then haul me to the buffet, where he would fortify himself with a glass of Beaujolais. At the buffet I remember meeting a red-bearded gnome of a colonial soldier who kept referring to himself as “a real porpoise.” “Porpoise” was the traditional Army term for a colonial infantryman. “A real porpoise,” the soldier repeated dreamily, “an old porpoise, and believe me, Monsieur, the Germans need somebody to bust their snouts for them.” He had two complete sets of decorations, one from the old war and one from the new. He was going north to rejoin his regiment and he was full of fight and red wine.

  Saturday morning I had another note from Jean-Pierre. He enclosed a bit of steel from a Dornier shot down near him. “How I am still alive I have not time to write to you,” he said, “but chance sometimes manages things well.” The letter produced the same effect on me as news of a great victory. I called up Henri. He and Eglée had had a letter too.

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  On Saturday, May 18th, I went to a press conference held by the Ministry of Information, which had just organized an Anglo-American press section, with quarters in a vast, rococo ballroom at the Hôtel Continental called the Salle des Fêtes. Pierre Comert, chief of the section, held conferences for the correspondents at six every evening, when he would discuss the day’s developments from the government’s point of view. This evening he announced that Paul Reynaud had taken over the Ministry of National Defence. He also announced that Reynaud had recalled Marshal Pétain from Spain to advise him. General Weygand had already arrived from Syria and it was understood that he would take over the high command in a few days. The two great names, in conjunction, were expected to raise national morale. The two old men, however, were military opposites. Pétain, cautious at sixty, when he had defended Verdun, was at eighty-four incapable of conceiving any operation bolder than an orderly retreat. Weygand believed in unremitting attack. One staff officer later told me, “Weygand’s ideas are so old-fashioned that they have become modern again. He is just what we need.” Strategically, the two men cancelled each other, but politically they were a perfect team. Both were clericals, royalists, and anti-parliamentarians. There is something about very old soldiers like Hindenburg and Pétain that makes democrats trust them. But Pétain was to serve Laval’s purpose as Hindenburg had served Hitler’s. However, we were cheerful on the evening we heard about the appointments. The German advance was apparently slowing down, and all of us thought that Weygand might arrange a counterattack soon. A week earlier we had been expecting victories. Now we were cheered by a slightly slower tempo of disaster.

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  There was a hot, heavy pause the next few days. I took long walks on the boulevards, and up and down dull, deserted business streets. The wartime population of Paris had slowly increased from late November until April, as evacuated families returned from the provinces, but since the beginning of the offensive the population had again decreased. All the people who remained in town seemed to concentrate on the boulevards. It gave them comfort to look at one another. They were not yet consciously afraid, however. There were long queues in front of the movie houses, especially those that showed double features. You could get a table at a sidewalk café only with difficulty, and the ones that had girl orchestras did particularly well. One girl orchestra, at the Grande Maxeville, was called the Joyous Wings and its bandstand and instruments had been decorated with blue airplanes. There were no young soldiers in the streets, because no furloughs were being issued.

  It is simple now to say, “The war on the Continent was lost on May 15th.” But as the days in May passed, people in Paris only gradually came to suspect how disastrous that day had been. There was a time lag between every blow and the effect on public morale. I can’t remember exactly when I first became frightened, or when I first began to notice that the shapes of people’s faces were changing. There was plenty of food in Paris. People got thin worrying. I think I noticed first the thinning faces of the sporting girls in the cafés. Since the same girls came to the same cafés every night, it was easy to keep track. Then I became aware that the cheekbones, the noses, and the jaws of all Paris were becoming more prominent.

  There was no immediate danger in Paris unless the Germans bombed it, and when the news was in any degree encouraging I did not think of bombing at all. When the news was bad I thought of bombing with apprehension. It helped me understand why troops in a winning army are frequently brave and on the losing side aren’t. We heard anti-aircraft fire every night now, but there were no air-raid alarms, because the planes the guns were firing at were reconnaissance planes. The heaviest shooting would begin in the gray period just before dawn. You wouldn’t really settle down to sleep until the morning shooting was over, and you wouldn’t wake up until noon.

  On the night of May 21st, after Paul Reynaud announced to the Senate that the Germans were at Arras and that France was in danger, I had a frousse—a scare—of such extreme character that it amounted to le trac, which means a complete funk. It was an oppressively hot night, with thunder as well as anti-aircraft fire, interspersed with noises which sounded like the detonations of bombs in the suburbs. When I lay on my bed face down, I couldn’t help thinking of a slave turning his back to the lash, and when I lay on my back I was afraid of seeing the ceiling fall on me. Afterward I talked to dozens of other people about that night and they all said they’d suffered from the same funk. The next morning’s papers carried Weygand’s opinion that the situation was not hopeless. This cheered everybody. It has since been revealed that May 21st, the day
of the great frousse, was the day set for the counterattack which might have cracked the Germans. It never came, and by May 22nd, when we were all beginning to feel encouraged, the opportunity had been missed.

  Later that day, word got around among the correspondents that negotiations were already on for a separate peace and that if the French didn’t sign it the Germans might arrive in Paris in a few days. This counteracted the effect of the Weygand message. Still later, I felt encouraged again as I watched a city gardener weed a bed of petunias in the Square Louvois, the tiny park under my hotel window. Surely, I thought, if the old man believed the Germans were coming in, he would not be bothering with the petunias.

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  The greatest encouragement I got during those sad weeks came from Jean-Pierre. Shortly after the Reynaud speech, I went up the hill to Montmartre to take some flowers to Jean-Pierre’s mother. For once, Henri and Eglée were smiling at the same time. “You should have been here early this morning for a good surprise!” Henri shouted. “At five there was a knock at our door.” “And who do you suppose it was?” his wife cried, taking over the narrative. “Suzette?” I demanded, naming their married daughter, who lived in Grenoble. I was sure that it had been Jean-Pierre, but I wanted to prolong Eglée’s pleasure. “No,” Eglée announced happily. “It was Jean-Pierre. He was magnificent. He looked like a cowboy.” “He came with his adjudant,” Henri broke in, “to get engine parts they needed for tanks. The boy has no rest, you know,” he said proudly. “When the division goes into action he fights. When they are in reserve and the other fellows rest, he is head of a repair section. He is a magician with engines. And his morale is good! He says that the first days were hard, but that now they know they can beat the Boche.” “On the first day of the battle, Jean-Pierre’s general was arrested,” Eglée said, with a sort of pride. “What canaille! Jean said it was fantastic what a traitor the general turned out to be. And there were German spies in French officers’ uniforms!” “They met a regiment of artillery without officers,” Henri said, “but completely! ‘So much the better,’ the artillerists said. ‘They were traitors anyway. But where in the name of God are we supposed to go?’ Fifteen German bombers appeared over Jean-Pierre’s unit. ‘We’re in for it,’ he said to himself. But the boy was lucky. The Germans had dropped their bombs elsewhere. Then Jean-Pierre’s unit met German tanks. He says our fellows rode right over them. ‘There may be a great many of them,’ he said, ‘but we are better than they are. Our guns penetrate them but they do not penetrate us. As for the spy problem, we have solved that. We simply shoot all officers we do not know.’ Jean-Pierre and the adjudant stayed for breakfast. Then they had to go away.”