Chapter Twenty-six
• 1940 •
When Marie looked back, she wished that she could have done more herself, but she understood that she could not. And she wished that Charlie had not hurt his father—though she knew he never meant to.
But what was the use of wishing? It was a time of trial, when everything was changed.
It was not that the French had been unprepared for war. The huge Maginot Line of fortified defenses along France’s eastern front was virtually impregnable. Six years ago, whatever Hitler’s grandiose plans, the French army had outnumbered and outgunned him. Had he attacked even three years ago, she thought, he might still have been crushed.
Back in 1936, when Hitler occupied part of the Rhineland, and the Western powers had agreed to it, Marie had told herself it was for the best. In 1938, when he’d taken a bite out of poor Czechoslovakia—and France and Britain, despite their treaties with the Czechs, had accepted Hitler’s assurances at Munich that he meant only peace—she had felt uneasy.
But it was meeting an Englishman at a cocktail party in Paris soon afterward that had really alarmed her. He was a ramrod-straight, somewhat peppery British officer, on secondment from the British army to the French Staff College, where he was teaching military intelligence. Was he worried about the situation with Hitler? she asked him.
“Of course I am, madame.” He spoke excellent French.
“People always say that it would take Germany twenty years to be ready for war,” Marie suggested.
“Yes, madame. That is the received wisdom. And the original estimate was probably accurate. Unfortunately, it was made just after the Great War—nearly twenty years ago.”
“You do not think Hitler’s intentions are peaceful?”
“Why should I, when Mein Kampf says explicitly that he wants war, and when he is rearming Germany at a fantastic rate?”
“Is this a widespread belief?”
“My brother-in-law is the military attaché in Poland. He tells me that everyone in Eastern Europe knows exactly what Hitler is up to. Our air attaché in Berlin told London that all the new commercial and private airports Hitler is building in Germany could be converted to military airfields in days. He was recalled home in disgrace for saying it.”
“I lived for years in England, you know, and I always follow the British Parliament. Mr. Churchill makes the same warnings about rearmament, but he seems to be almost a lone voice.”
“He’s only saying what the whole diplomatic corps and military intelligence know to be true. The conference at Munich was a farce.”
“It’s hard to believe that anyone would want another war.”
“Hitler does.”
“The French defenses are still strong.”
“The Maginot Line is magnificent, madame, but the cost of building it has been so great that it doesn’t go all the way north to the sea. The Germans could come across the north, and if we mass our armies there, that still leaves a convenient gap between the Maginot Line and the northern plain.”
“But that’s the Ardennes. It’s all mountain and impenetrable forest.”
“ ‘Impenetrable’ is a big word, madame. Come through the Ardennes and you’re in the open fields of Champagne with a clear run to Paris.”
“Our army is still large.”
“It is, madame, and your men are brave. Moreover, you actually have more tanks than the Germans. But the tanks are scattered all over the place, whereas the Germans have a large, concentrated force of tanks with the proper air cover which can advance with devastating speed. There’s a thoughtful officer in the French army who advocates tank formations like the German ones. His name’s de Gaulle, and you’ve probably never heard of him. He’s not senior enough to get the general staff to listen to him. But he’s absolutely correct.”
Marie told Roland about the conversation afterward.
“I’ve never heard of de Gaulle either,” he said, “but your Englishman may be right.”
For Marie and Roland, the rest of 1938 and the first half of 1939 passed quietly. Charlie was spending the month of August with them at the château when the news that stupefied all Europe arrived.
“Russia and Germany have made a pact?” cried Marie. “I can’t believe it. They’re sworn enemies. They hate each other. How can they be allies?”
Roland had little doubt.
“It must mean war,” he said. “The logic is inescapable: Stalin has seen that his Western allies are too weak to help him against Germany, so he’s done a deal with Hitler. And why’s Hitler done it? Russia has raw materials he needs. But above all he wants to neutralize the Soviets while he attacks the West. He doesn’t want a war on two fronts.”
“You think he’ll attack soon?” asked Charlie.
“Probably.”
“I’d better get ready to fight, then.”
August had scarcely ended when it came. And with a speed that was breathtaking.
Blitzkrieg. Hitler’s armored columns swept through Poland and crushed it. France and Britain declared war and began a naval blockade of German shipping. But they were powerless to save poor Poland, which Germany soon divided up with her new ally, Russia.
As for Charlie, he didn’t even wait for the call. He went straight to Paris to offer himself to the army.
It was a sunny day when he departed. As he was leaving his Voisin at the château, Marie and Roland saw him off at the train station.
How handsome he looked, waiting on the platform. It seemed to her that she felt just the same pride, and secret fear, as if he’d been her own. Then the little steam engine puffed and clanked its way up the line toward them, and the railway cars slowed to a halt, and he prepared to swing himself up.
“One small thing, mon fils,” his father said. And he reached into his pocket. “This little lighter, as you know, was made for me by a trooper in the Great War. It’s nothing much to look at, but it brought me luck. Take it, and perhaps it will do the same for you.”
Charlie looked at the little shell casing, slipped it into his coat pocket and grinned.
“I shall keep it with me at all times.” He embraced his father. After stepping into the carriage, he turned to look out the open window. As the train moved off, he waved to his father and blew a kiss to Marie. She and Roland stayed on the platform until he was out of sight.
“I’m sure he’ll be all right,” she said.
The months that followed were a strange time. The French army was deployed. A large British force had come to northern France. Yet nothing seemed to happen. Hitler made no further western move. October and November passed. Then Christmas. Still nothing. “The phony war,” the British called it. The funny sort of war, said the French: la drôle de guerre.
As usual, they spent most of the months of winter and spring in Paris. And during this time Marie was interested to observe a new mood setting in. By year end, their friends were starting to talk about what they might do in the summer. In January, a fashionable neighbor who also had a son in the army remarked that it was high time her boy had some leave. “I dare say this war will fizzle out soon enough,” her neighbor concluded. “The Germans won’t dare attack France.” It seemed to be the general view.
Marie couldn’t share it. To her clear mind, this attitude was evidence of how quickly human nature will take a temporary reprieve from disaster as a sign that the threat can be discounted.
Yet as it turned out, the development that would change everything for the family was one she hadn’t foreseen at all. It happened late in March.
She had just returned to the rue Bonaparte from a visit to her brother Marc when a telegram came from Charlie. It was addressed to her, rather than his father. It told her his leg was badly broken, and ended with the single plea: HELP ME.
“Why the devil did he send it to you and not me?” asked Roland, puzzled rather than angry.
Marie didn’t tell him, but she had guessed at once.
In Roland’s aristocratic world, a man migh
t have the best of everything, but when it came to being injured at war, then you took whatever the army doctors offered and you didn’t complain. Charlie hadn’t actually been wounded in battle, but he’d fallen and been struck by a tank during maneuvers, and broken his leg in several places.
“The military doctors know what they’re doing,” Roland told her. “If he walks with a limp, he walks with a limp. No dishonor in that.”
Marie said nothing. She went straight to the telephone. Within an hour, she’d discovered the best surgeon for that kind of injury in Paris, spoken to his office and made all the arrangements. She’d even spoken to Charlie’s colonel in person. Using the combination of her rank and wealth, and the skills she had developed running Joséphine, she both intimidated and charmed the colonel. By that evening, somewhat sedated and strapped to splints, Charlie was being whisked in a private ambulance to Paris. Having discovered that the surgeon operated not only at one of the great Parisian hospitals, but also at the American Hospital at Neuilly, she had also gotten the surgeon to admit him there.
“Charlie will be more comfortable at Neuilly,” she said firmly.
“Women shouldn’t interfere in these things,” Roland grumbled, though Marie suspected he was secretly amused.
The spring of 1940 was beautiful and surprisingly warm. Each day, on her way to see Charlie at the hospital, Marie would tell the chauffeur to take a route through the quiet boulevards and avenues of Neuilly—boulevard d’Inkermann was her favorite—so that she could see the soft lines of horse chestnuts putting on their leaves and breaking, early, into their white blossoms.
The operation had been a great success. With luck, and careful treatment, Charlie would be able to walk quite normally. “But you must be patient,” the doctor told him. “This will take time.” By mid-April, it was agreed that, rather than go to a convalescent home, he should return to the apartment on the rue Bonaparte where Marie made arrangements for a private nurse to be in attendance.
A string of friends came to see him, and he seemed to be constantly on the telephone. His father would read the paper with him each day and discuss the news. Marie would play cards with him. He seemed to be cheerful enough. Only one thing irked him.
It started as a joke. One of his friends pretended to believe that his injury was a skiing accident. Within a day, the idea had gone around all his friends in Paris. It was meant as a harmless bit of teasing, yet it had to be confessed that behind it lay the perception that Charlie was the rich, athletic aristocrat who could do anything he liked.
And Charlie would probably have taken it in good part if it hadn’t been for the circumstances.
For in April, Hitler had been on the move again. Scandinavia this time: Denmark and Norway both fell, their monarchs unwillingly forced to acknowledge a German overlord. In England, the more pugnacious Churchill replaced Chamberlain as prime minister.
“I should be back on duty, ready to fight,” he moaned. “And everyone is going to say I wasn’t there because of a stupid skiing accident.”
“No one seems to believe that France will even have to go to war,” Marie said to comfort him. And it was perfectly true. Even now, as the warm days of May began, Parisians were starting to sit outside the bistros and cafés to enjoy the sunshine as if Hitler and his armies belonged in another universe.
“But you think we’re going to war, don’t you?” Charlie replied. And she couldn’t deny it.
To Roland she confessed: “I’m just relieved he isn’t on the front line.”
Roland, of course, would never admit to such a thing.
“The boy can’t fight on crutches,” he muttered, “and that’s all there is to say.”
It came on the eighth day of May. Blitzkrieg. Straight through Belgium, the Netherlands, tiny Luxembourg and the Ardennes. The German armored divisions poured through between the end of the Maginot Line and the French and British forces guarding the northern coastal plain.
It happened so fast that, in later years, people would say that the French collapsed and gave up in face of the onslaught. It was not so at all. The French fought heroically. But, just as had happened in the Great War before, the high command had not adapted to the latest modern warfare. That essential combination of tanks operating with air cover, on a large scale, was lacking. Even the tank division bravely commanded by Colonel de Gaulle was forced to retire in the face of overwhelming air attack from German Stukas.
In the space of days, France lost a hundred thousand men—not casualties, but killed.
By early June, the British forces, together with a hundred thousand French troops, were trapped against the coast at Dunkirk, while Paris lay open before the German divisions.
In Paris, Charlie was beside himself.
“I’m sitting here doing nothing to defend my country,” he cried.
But his father was more realistic.
“There is nothing useful you could have done,” he told him grimly. “The war is already over. The British are about to be annihilated at Dunkirk, and that’s it.”
He was right—and, miraculously, wrong. Hitler, having just won the war, didn’t realize it. Fearful that his lines were overextended—they were, but the Allies had no armor to throw at them—and trusting mistakenly in the Luftwaffe to finish the British army on the huge beaches of Dunkirk, he hesitated. And thanks to this God-given but astounding military error, Paris learned days later that nearly a third of a million British and French troops had been ferried across the English Channel to safety.
But France itself could not be saved. France was lost. By the tenth of June, people were evacuating. Roland told Marie and Charlie that they must all go down to the château. “The Germans will occupy Paris,” he said. “If they take over the apartment, so be it. But at all costs we must try to save the château.”
They set off at dawn, but the lines of people along the roads were so great that they did not reach the château until nightfall. The following day, they heard that Paris had been declared an open city, rather than have the Germans perhaps destroy it. Five days later, the elderly General Pétain, the hero of the Great War who had secretly brought the mutiny to an end, took over as premier of France.
“That’s good,” Roland declared. “Pétain has judgment. He’s a man one can trust.” And when, the very next day, Pétain declared an armistice with the Germans, Roland only shrugged and remarked that he didn’t see what else the old man could do.
It had always been a source of some amusement to Roland and Charlie that Marie insisted on listening to the BBC on her wireless. The signal was not strong, but she could still pick it up at the château.
“You spent too many years in England,” Roland would tell her with an affectionate kiss. “You believe that only the English news can be trusted.”
But it was thanks to Marie’s prejudice that the family listened to a broadcast, arranged at short notice, that very few people in France ever heard.
It was late afternoon on the very day after Pétain had announced the armistice that Marie called to Roland to come to the wireless at once. Charlie was already in the room, sitting with his leg stretched out on a stool.
“There’s going to be a statement from a French officer, who has just flown to London,” she told him urgently.
“About what?”
“I have no idea.”
The voice that came across the airwaves was deep, sonorous and firm. It announced, in total defiance of Pétain, that France had not fallen, that France would never surrender, but that Frenchmen outside France, in England and in France’s colonies, with the help of others including the Americans across the ocean, would restore France. And it urged all men under arms who were able to do so to join him as quickly as possible.
The message was startling. The language in which it was delivered was as magisterial as it was simple. The voice declared that, in the meantime, though he had only just been promoted to the rank of general, he was declaring himself the legitimate government of France, in exil
e, and that he would broadcast again from London the following day.
The name of the general was de Gaulle. “That’s the man who wanted more tanks,” Marie said. “The one that the English officer told me about after Munich.”
“He’s mad, but magnificent,” Roland remarked.
Charlie said nothing.
But the next day, he told Roland and Marie what he proposed to do. And Marie’s heart sank.
History gives no precise date for when the French Resistance began. In his three broadcasts of June 1940—on the eighteenth and nineteenth, and a longer broadcast, heard by many more people, on the twenty-second—de Gaulle called all military forces to the aid of their country, but made no mention of any internal resistance movement. Little of significance seems to have happened before 1941.
But there was one man in France who believed he could say precisely when, and where, the Resistance began. And that was Thomas Gascon.
Because he started it.
Thomas Gascon’s defiance of Hitler and his regime began on the morning of Saturday, the twenty-second day of June, 1940. Hitler himself was hardly thirty miles to the north of Paris that day, at Compiègne, signing the new armistice in the very same railway carriage that had been used to sign the old armistice of 1918, so humiliating to Germany, that ended the Great War.
“He will come to Paris,” Thomas remarked to Luc as they sat at a table outside the little bar near the Moulin Rouge.
“We don’t know that.”
“Of course we do. He’s just won the war. Paris is at his feet. Obviously he’ll come.”
“Perhaps. But when?”
“Tomorrow.” Thomas looked at Luc as if his brother was foolish. “He’s a busy man. He’s here. He’ll come tomorrow.”
“And what of it?”
“He’ll want to go up the Eiffel Tower.”
“Probably.” Luc took out a Gauloise and lit it. “Most people do.”
“Well, he’s not going up. He may have kicked our asses, but he’s not going to look down on Paris as if he owns it from the top of Monsieur Eiffel’s tower. I won’t allow it.”
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