England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  Owen died on 4 November 1918, one of thousands killed in the last week of the war. In the ninety-five days between Ludendorff’s Black Day and 11 November the British had about 250,000 men killed or wounded, their highest daily casualty rate since the last bout of fluid fighting in 1914. The French, of course, did not for a single moment accept that les Anglais had done more to bring about the final defeat of Germany than they had. Quite the opposite. For them it was the grit of the poilu and genius of Foch, particularly his counter-offensive along the Marne, that did the trick. This had been followed by his famous call to arms, ‘Tout le monde à la bataille!’: simultaneous attacks along the entire front to which everybody had contributed, even the British, though it was mainly the French, and occasionally the Americans, who made any real headway.

  So the war’s principal Allies, like opposing drivers in a car crash, clung to their own version of events, each over the years enshrining it into their national mythologies. But for 1938’s royal visit to Boulogne these indelible subtexts were decently camouflaged and the events of almost a quarter of a century ago looked at through the rosy prism of the revived Entente. For while they had squabbled Germany had rearmed and re-entered the Rhineland and, like an old loveless couple faced with an outside threat, France and Britain needed each other again. Both countries were determined to make the visit a huge success, the democracies’ riposte to the torch-lit pageants in Berlin and Rome.

  From the Eiffel Tower fluttered 1,500 square yards of Union flag and a delighted British ambassador assured the Foreign Office, ‘No celebration since the Armistice has aroused such deep feeling.’ At Versailles the King dressed as an admiral to review a march past of 50,000 troops and afterwards attended a state banquet in the Hall of Mirrors, which was said to be the most august occasion since Clemenceau signed the peace treaty there. Waiters clad in the ornate livery, powdered wigs and knee breeches Louis XVI would have found familiar served thirteen different wines with courses that included caviar, quail stuffed with foie gras, and Périgord truffles. Madame Lebrun even attempted to greet her royal guests with a curtsy, a génuflexion en catastrophé according to the Manchester Guardian’s Alexander Werth and an outrage for those guardians of France’s republican flame who felt it was no way for their first lady to behave.

  Privately, Édouard Daladier, the French Prime Minister, indulged in a little republican reaction of his own by confiding to the American ambassador William Bullitt that George was ‘a moron’ and Elizabeth ‘ready to sacrifice every other country in the world’ in order to remain Queen. But Daladier well understood the uses of constitutional monarchy and in terms of the realpolitik at hand the visit had been as helpful as the arrival of King George’s grandfather Edward to Paris in 1903. Then later that year another Englishman really did win Gallic hearts and a lot of others besides.

  In September came the Munich crisis. Hitler, encouraged by the way the appeasing democracies accepted Austria’s recent union with the Third Reich, annexed another juicy remnant of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire: Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland with its 3 million German speakers and Pilsen’s tank-building Skoda works. France, and to a lesser extent Britain, had guaranteed Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty and it looked as if war was inevitable. On both sides of the Channel gas masks were issued to civilians and air-raid shelters dug. The Czechs mobilized and so did the British fleet. In France reservists were called up to reinforce the conscripts manning the foul-smelling concrete subterranean fortresses – there were problems with their septic tanks – along the eastern frontier’s Maginot line, named after the Verdun amputee André Maginot, Secretary of State for War when he died in 1932.

  But neither France nor Britain really had the stomach for a fight. ‘Let’s not be heroic,’ pleaded the arch-appeaser Georges Bonnet, Daladier’s Foreign Minister, and it did not fall on deaf ears. Just like England, where H.G. Wells’s 1936 film Things to Come had played to packed cinemas, France was obsessed by apocalyptic visions of aerial warfare. Picasso’s Guernica at the Spanish government’s pavilion had been one of the most talked-about exhibits at 1937’s International Exposition in Paris. The Czech crisis packed the capital’s railway stations with panic-stricken civilians convinced that Guernica was about to be writ large and traffic jammed the major highways west and south. The Aviation Minister encouraged his colleagues to follow his own example and send their families to the safety of Brittany. Some of those left behind looted Jewish-owned shops and chanted, ‘Down with the Jewish war.’ Who else would want to take on Hitler?

  Then along came the Prince of Peace cunningly disguised as an elderly clerk in a wing-collar and tie, striped trousers and carrying an umbrella. Neville Chamberlain, Britain’s septuagenarian Prime Minister, became a hero in both countries when he flew, for the first time in his life, to meet Hitler in Munich and returned with his autograph on a note pledging ‘the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again’. In London he appeared on the Buckingham Palace balcony with the King and Queen while the throng below cheered him to the heavens. In Paris Daladier, who also attended the four-power meeting along with Mussolini, got similar treatment including an open-topped car ride from Le Bourget airport through flag-waving, flower-throwing crowds. But the French recognized the real architect of the Munich Agreement which had given Hitler the Sudetenland because he said this was the end of his territorial ambition. In Paris a public appeal was started to buy Chamberlain a house with a trout stream where he could enjoy the fly fishing of which he was said to be so fond; around the Eiffel Tower the souvenir shops had a new line in lucky umbrellas ‘à la Chamberlain’.

  Enthusiasm for peace at any price spanned the political spectrum. ‘Anything, even the cruellest injustice, was better than war,’ wrote the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, lover and intellectual soundboard of Jean-Paul Sartre, already becoming an icon of the left with that year’s publication of his autobiographical novel La Nausée. Pétain, whose sympathies, like most senior officers’, were with the Catholic right, congratulated the cautious Bonnet for saving his country from certain defeat. ‘I know how you have struggled to avoid war,’ he said. ‘You were right; we would have been beaten.’

  De Gaulle, now a full colonel in charge of a tank brigade at Metz, disagreed, declaring that the time gained by the Munich Agreement resembled poor Comtesse du Barry’s famous last words beneath the guillotine: ‘Another few seconds please Mr Executioner.’ It was not his first disagreement with his old mentor. On military theory there had long been a parting of the ways. His belief in offensive tank warfare challenged the maréchal’s unshakable faith in the Maginot line as the apogee of a Verdun-style static defence and an unspoken promise that France would never strike first.

  De Gaulle’s firm anti-appeasement views matched those of an influential politician who had begun to take an interest in his advocacy of a smaller, mechanized, more professional army. Paul Reynaud, a member of the centre-right Alliance Démocratique, got on well with Churchill and this was hardly surprising for he had much in common with Britain’s maverick Tory who was four years his senior. Both had held Cabinet office several times then been dropped by their parties for going against the prevailing pacifism and warning of the dangers of paying Hitler’s Danegeld. ‘Disfigured the smiling landscape with a hideous blot,’ in the words of Churchill’s supporter and fellow Francophile Duff Cooper who had been the only member of Chamberlain’s Cabinet – he was in charge of the Admiralty – to resign over Munich.

  Reynaud was, like Churchill, a good parliamentary performer though the Sorbonne-trained lawyer and economist was better known for rapier thrusts of Cartesian logic than grand oratory. In appearance he was as short as de Gaulle was tall and kept himself trim with swimming and cycling. His enemies said he wore lifts and dyed his hair in order to please the Comtesse Hélène de Portes, a petite brunette who did not share his enthusiasm for the English and their desire to fight another war until the last Frenchman. In most accounts of these times the comtesse is
described as his mistress but this probably makes their relationship sound rather more racy than it was. They were openly living together in a country where divorce, as in England, was considered even more scandalous than extramarital sex.

  Unlike Churchill, who was still relegated to the back benches at the time of Munich, Daladier had put Reynaud back in the Cabinet, first as Justice then as Finance Minister which was the job he wanted. France’s economy was stagnating. Even by the standards of the Third Republic, with governments in and out of office like cuckoo clocks, and street cleaners always busy with the detritus of the latest riot, domestic politics had just undergone a particularly volatile spasm.

  It had begun almost two years before Munich, in June 1936, when the socialist Léon Blum, a brave and clever velvet-collared dandy, became France’s first Jewish Prime Minister as head of the left-wing coalition known as the Popular Front. This had outraged the anti-Semitic Catholic right in the National Assembly. Deputy Xavier Vallat, a pious one-eyed, one-legged war veteran who claimed to speak for the nation’s silent majority, described the secular Prime Minister, who had first made his name as a gifted literary and drama critic, as ‘a cunning talmudist’. Not long before, some of Vallat’s supporters had beaten up Blum who, aged 64, maintained an old-fashioned regard for the rights of the individual, which irritated the various admirers of the decade’s dictators.

  London had its political street violence too as Sir Oswald Mosley’s Black shirts clashed with Communists in the East End. But this was rarely lethal. In France there was the military-booted Solidarité Française in their blue berets and matching shirts and Colonel de la Rocque’s Croix de Feu which claimed half a million members. But the right’s most extreme reaction to the Popular Front was beyond the wildest dreams of their British equivalent. The terrorists of La Cagoule (the Cowl), whose wealthy backers included Eugène Schueller of L’Oréal cosmetics, had recruited service officers, lawyers, doctors and senior civil servants. Some were Fascist sympathizers, others were monarchists or conservative republicans. Almost all were Jew-hating nationalists who believed that the Bolsheviks were at Christendom’s gates and something must be done.

  Aircraft flying arms from France to the Spanish republicans, whose left-wing government was also called the Popular Front, were sabotaged. La Cagoule were never able to get to Blum but among their victims were two prominent Italian anti-Fascists who had sought sanctuary in France, and a beautiful prostitute suspected of disclosing their activities to the Sûreté, who was stabbed to death on the Métro. In the hope of provoking a Franco-style military coup against the Popular Front bombs were planted in the kind of exclusive suburb Trotskyite terrorists might target. Despite this, during the twelve months before Blum was forced out of office, the Front managed to introduce the kind of reforms British trade unionists only dreamed about: as well as the forty-hour working week, there were paid holidays, collective bargaining and nationalization of the railways.

  ‘Better Hitler than Blum,’ said his opponents and it was not only Les Cagoulards who meant it. Among his critics was Pierre Laval, twice Prime Minister and Time magazine’s ‘Man of the Year 1931’ (1930’s was Gandhi) where he was lauded, among other things, for his firm hand with the French economy. Laval, a trade union lawyer who had become a successful entrepreneur owning newspapers and radio stations, was once as left wing as Blum, then took democracy’s well-trodden path from a wing to the central place where the most votes live most of the time. Apart from his stints as Prime Minister he had been a key figure in almost all of the reshuffled governments that ruled France, between 1930 and 1936 and as Minister of Labour had succeeded in pushing the Social Insurance Act through the National Assembly.

  But his main interest was abroad and during his four terms as Foreign Minister he subscribed to the general view that Germany was France’s ‘hereditary enemy’. In the spring of 1935, a couple of months before he became premier for the second time, Laval crafted an unlikely pact between Mussolini’s Italy, Britain and France intended to curb German ambitions in Austria. Then it fell apart when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1936 and, much to Laval’s disgust, Britain went wobbly on him and quit, partly because it feared an expansionist Fascist Italy on the border of colonial Kenya. It cost him his job. He never forgave the British for it and his newspapers and radio stations began to campaign for a rapprochement with Germany and against Blum’s Popular Front with its hard line on all Europe’s dictators except the one in Moscow.

  Other protests were more extreme and some days it seemed that the country was teetering on the brink of total anarchy. Agitators who wanted revolution not reform made sure the workforce was constantly demanding more. At Renault the dispute was no longer even with the management but against ‘union tyranny’. During a transport strike it was Blum who called in the army to deliver food. Then six people were killed by police during a riot in the working-class district of Clichy and a heartbroken Blum, who had just been to the opera, was snapped in white tie and tails as he rushed to the scene with the press and the ambulances. ‘Who said this man has no French blood?’ enquired a cartoonist in a Paris daily where blatant anti-Semitism might lose a newspaper advertising but rarely circulation.

  Foreign correspondents were beginning to speculate that France might be heading for a civil war as frightful as the one next door in Spain where neither side were taking many prisoners. For a while, despite Blum’s departure, the Popular Front lingered on: first under Camille Chautemps, who as a young man had played rugby for Paris’s Stade Français but was not renowned for his political backbone, then for a month under Blum again, and then Daladier who called the economy ‘the fourth arm of defence’ and invited Reynaud on board to make it strong.

  Despite his impeccable anti-Fascist credentials, Reynaud’s liberal economic policies – ‘the laws of profits, individual risk, free markets, and growth by competition’ – would never have been tolerated by the original Front. One of the first casualties was the famous forty-hour week. An austerity programme cut all government subsidies except to the armament industries. There were strikes and protests but times had changed and they were faced down. In a year Reynaud’s reforms had increased the Treasury coffers by 11 billion francs and Hélène de Portes was telling people that many of the Cabinet thought her Paul should replace Daladier as Prime Minister.

  By now the lucky umbrellas were gathering dust. Even before Hitler trampled all over the Munich Agreement by marching into Prague, Chamberlain’s triumph had been undergoing a reassessment. In April 1939 Britain, France and Poland – which owed its existence to the French desire to have a beholden ally on Germany’s eastern border – signed a ‘mutual assistance’ pact. Hitler now wanted mainly German-speaking Danzig, the Baltic port that under the Versailles Treaty had a League of Nations administrator and Polish customs control. After years of disarmament, with France often branded as an aggressor for its insistence on maintaining a large army, Britain had introduced conscription – a first in peacetime – and accelerated its expansion of the Royal Air Force.

  On Bastille Day, July 1939, exactly twenty years after the victory parade, British troops once again marched down the Champs-Élysées when the Grenadier Guards, boiling under their bearskins and ceremonial scarlet, helped celebrate the French Revolution’s 150th anniversary. Watching them was Général Maurice-Gustave Gamelin, the French Commander-in-Chief who knew that, if war came soon, he was looking at one of the better parts of the very small number of trained British infantry available. Standing alongside him was the stocky figure of Gamelin’s British equivalent, Lord Gort VC, who had inherited an Irish viscountcy at sixteen. The Grenadiers were Gort’s old regiment. In the last weeks of the war he had been badly wounded and added a Victoria Cross to three DSOs and an MC, commanding a Grenadier battalion in an attack on the Hindenburg line. Now, as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Gort was putting together a wartime contingency plan to reinforce France’s eighty divisions with an initial four British ones and an armoured brigade. Ab
out 160,000 men compared with 1 million. True, more divisions – mostly Territorial Army – would follow but they were so unprepared it was intended that they should complete their training in France while acting as lines of communcations troops. It was Sir John French’s ‘contemptible little army’ all over again, only worse.

  As far as Gamelin was concerned, what Westminster had done to its army since the last time they were invited to march down the Champs-Élysées was criminal. At the 1918 armistice the British Army in France had numbered about 1.5 million UK British plus 500,000 Dominion and Indian troops. Two years later the rush to get men out of uniform was such that it had been reduced to 370,000 and, with smaller defence budgets every year since, was in free fall. All this was in accordance with popular feeling. Even during the high unemployment of the early 1930s anti-militarism was so strong there were never enough volunteers to meet the army’s shrinking requirements. Nor did successive governments particularly care because for years the prevailing thinking was that the British Army would never need to fight on continental Europe again. Two months after Hitler had come to power, more defence cuts had reduced the army’s budget to its nadir. ‘Thank God for the French army,’ an almost lone voice told the Commons. That was in the spring of 1933 when the warmonger Churchill was an exclusive taste.