The Avignon Quintet (95 page)

Paris Twilight

T
HE GERMAN OFFENSIVES FOLLOWED SO FAST
,
ONE UPON
another, that they left the German General Staff almost breathless with exultation. It was as if all they touched turned to gold – they had difficulty in catching up with themselves. They lived with the unexpected, each victory seeming so easy and so inexpensive that life had the signature of a great adventure. Their own casualty lists were so ridiculously low that it seemed almost beyond belief that within a few months they had shattered and dismantled all the powerful armies surrounding them. They were left sole possessors of the field – a field which now seemed to be expanding itself limitlessly, effortlessly, with only the distant Caucasus mountains as a boundary to German ambitions. All reservations were gone. They were madly in love with the Leader who seemed to them now to have righted every wrong, to have subjugated the traditional enemies of the Reich. The feeling of invincibility made them drunk. The future of Germany was opening before their bemused eyes as if on a huge screen. History had turned turtle and a new German Empire had come into being overnight.

Von Esslin had never been so certain of the appropriateness of his emotions. It was almost with tears, which he uncharacteristically allowed to grip his heart, that he stood to the salute on the sunny Champs Elysées and watched the Leader gliding down through the silent crowds, standing upright in his triumphal car, pale of face, distraught of mien. No wonder he looked pale after the strain of plotting all these vast manoeuvres, directing whole armies like clouds to do his bidding. The giant brain of that little figure had launched Von Esslin like an avenging catapult first into Warsaw, and now sheer through the Ardennes into a France taken so much by surprise that resistance was nil. The French General Staff had been knocked off their perch. Chaos now reigned. Von Esslin’s tanks had behaved with exemplary skill and force – but with such unexpected speed that they had run out of petrol and lost touch with command; had been forced to hold up ordinary commercial petrol pumps like gangsters. It had been great fun. At every halt he could hear the laughter of his “young lions” as they stepped from their machines. Sometimes in sheer exuberance they would burst out laughing and pummel each other playfully. Resistance? There had been a little light skirmishing, that was all. A few
franc-tireurs
had been summarily shot against the walls of village
mairies
. All’s fair in love and war! Instructions to the German troops were to administer swift and fatal justice to any who might stand in their way or hesitate to acclaim their triumphant passage. The terrified inhabitants of the towns and villages they entered were in no state to withstand the murderous élan of the Nazi advance. They sank speechless before this grey tide of men and machines. God, but it was beautiful to watch the panzer divisions fan away at speed down the country roads – not unlike the start of some speed trials, say the opening of Le Mans! The dust and whirl of their passage shook the earth and reverberated throatily in the sky. They passed strings, groups, columns of dispirited and disoriented prisoners aimlessly walking in every direction of the compass. They had no point of reference in a world where both morale and communications had failed them. The encircling German forces might appear from anywhere. Of course the heavy fighting was taking place far away to the West, but even here the catastrophe had already declared itself; the defeat was unequivocal. The sunny weather made the run-in on Paris almost a holiday event and Von Esslin felt himself to be getting quite brown from the sunshine; he sat in the back of the staff car with the hood down. Yes, it was not perhaps very wise, but there it was, victory is like strong drink. There had been some light machine-gunning from the air, but it seemed to the Germans in their present euphoria as light as spring rain merely; it rippled the corn and knocked branches off the trees. Von Esslin found himself humming an air from
Don Giovanni
as he read the coded messages which ordered him to group his armour around Belmoth. There was some resistance in that area and once or twice they crossed the tracks of some heavy artillery moving up that way. But no trace of a real road block, no ambushes, no gross air movement. It was wonderful to be alive. They ate ravenously under an oak tree and monitored the crackle of messages coming in; all the real hard work was being done away on the right flank.

While they were eating there came a slow drift of motorised infantry moving up to clear the sticky villages and a great friend of Von Esslin hailed him: “Klaus!” They were enchanted to meet, and overcome with laughter at this piquant encounter so near to Paris. The young officer elected to spend a few moments sharing a sandwich with Von Esslin and exchanging such news as he could mobilise after a night and a day of speedy advancing upon a non-existent enemy. “I can’t believe it!” he kept exclaiming. “I hope there is no catch in it!” The elder man patted him on the back and assured him that there could not be. “In one week, when we are billeted and organised, I shall meet you in Paris, at Feydal on the Champs Elysées, and we will drink a vintage champagne in honour of the Führer.”

The young officer took the challenge as seriously as it was meant to be taken. He stood up and clicked out his salute, and then took the General’s hand in his, saying, “Seriously?”

“Ein Mann, ein Wort,”
said Von Esslin with an explosive good humour. “My word of honour!” And indeed the somewhat rash promise was redeemed exactly on time, for the two of them met on the appointed day and hour and found a table in the sun at which to drink the promised toast. Moreover the Leader himself was there to look in upon the drinking. It was unforeseen, but it gave the toast significance.

But there was still some resistance ahead; Von Esslin felt the tanks and infantry gradually building up behind them like a wave. A staff officer reproached him for travelling thus in so very vulnerable a car, and though nettled he accepted the greater safety of a command car with a turret. All that night they were bogged down with this invisible resistance ahead, and then towards dawn it eased; it was as if someone had pulled a plug out of a bath. Everything started to flow again and a new momentum was achieved.

What surprised him – yet war is like that – was that he seemed to have missed all the major engagements of this period. They felt almost like holidaymakers. He had a confused memory of his young bronzed giants stripped to the waist, wading about in the ripe corn. It was beautiful to see – in his heart bourgeoned a renewed love for Germany. But what the devil was actually happening? He called for operational signals and a field orientation, and in doing so made contact with another of his cronies and contemporaries, a General Paulus who telephoned him to sketch in the background, the backcloth against which, like a blind man, Von Esslin was advancing. It was from Paulus that he learned of the tremendous exodus of the civilian populations of Belgium and the northern sectors of France – the thousands upon thousands who sought an imaginary safety in the southern parts of France which they believed would be behind the lines.

“What lines?” The German advance had been so hectic that frequently these marching hordes arrived in towns and villages only to find that they were already in German hands!

Confusion was total – their victory was more than just physical, it was quite as much psychological. All the little towns in the southern sector were already swollen with itinerant refugees for whom no sort of preparations had been envisaged. In Toulouse and Nîmes people slept on the pavements like gypsies. And during all this period of turmoil and upset Von Esslin’s forces advanced without undue stress or strain until they lay not far from the open road to Paris. It was unbelievable. Nightingales were singing in the woods. They had captured the contents of a wine cellar and the General sipped some wine and ate a biscuit for his lunch, though he spoke long and earnestly to his troop leaders. They must spare no effort to contain any disposition towards drink in the ranks of the tank-troopers. But how marvellous, how warming victory was! Terrified peasants here and there gave the Nazi salute in a cringing sort of way; then, delighted that they had not been shot at, they smirked. “The French will welcome us,” he thought, “for their heart was never in this war, and we have much to offer them in the New Order.” He nodded with a frown, as if he had need to insist on this point, to convince himself.

The world unrolled itself around him with a grand polyphonic flamboyance; he was dazed with the march of affairs. Moreover one of his tactical ploys had come to the notice of the Chief of Staff and earned him commendation! It was a lucky accident. Yet it had seemed to him self-evident, obvious – just the sort of thing that improvises itself in the heat of battle. In the general surge forward they had here and there met with road blocks and some spasmodic disposition to delay them. He had passed his panzer on to the adjacent railway line and let it crackle down the permanent way, to turn the flank of these obstacles. The use of railways … it would go into army manuals on tactics. It had been vastly amusing to watch the tanks hopping on and off the main line in order to let trains go through – the French Railways system simply could not admit to the existence of a war, much less to German tanks flopping in and out of their railway stations like so many rabbits. Here and there they fired a few bursts at a train, but it was largely for the fun of the thing. Once they even emptied an express – the people came scuttling out deathly pale with their hands above their heads. “What to do with them?” asked a bronzed patrol leader as he nudged them amiably towards the waiting-room of the station. “There was a French officer – that one over there – who fired at us with a pistol.” Von Esslin turned curtly away with a bark: “You know your orders.” As he got into his car again he heard the ripple of a machine-gun inside the station.

The rest of the tank brigade turned right across fields and joined the general advance upon a main road now littered with abandoned farm wagons and personal belongings. It was a great temptation to stop and examine all those burst suitcases from which protruded every sort of gear. Thank goodness, they were on wheels and moving fast – he would not have to read them a lesson about looting. That was to follow, of course, but in systematic fashion, in a punitive manner. Indeed the whole philosophy of their campaigns had already been laid down for them. They were to be just like Napoleon’s: campaigning
à la maraude
, as the French would soon find out. For a moment Von Esslin swelled with pride, and then the sentiment was swallowed up in a sort of guilty fury. France was finished! He struck his boot twice, hard, with a cane and immersed himself in deeply gratifying memories of the noise his steel-meshed caterpillars had made upon the railway lines. A flight of planes ahead of them swooped down and started chattering like magpies. Their advance slowed. Thick smoke and a series of thuds spoke of an engagement ahead; a burst oil drum had flooded the road and the hollow tanks swished about, as if in heavy rain. He pulled them off the main road and into the green fields on either side of it. It was late afternoon, soon dusk would come; they must gain as much ground as they could before bivouacking for the night. He called back for a few bus-loads of infantry to support the tanks as they combed the forest, firing odd bursts into the greenery in order to flush out troops which might be hiding there.

Once it had become fact it seemed so obvious, so inevitable, the total victory which had already altered the fate and disposition of so many nations – the British rout, the French collapse, the Low Countries … So many and so diverse were the successes that it was impossible to sketch in the boundaries of a future – for it spread out in every direction. He was not simply being Junker when, in response to the question: “In your view what should we next consider doing?” he had replied acidly: “I am a soldier of the Reich, I have no views. I simply do what the Leader says.” His interlocutor, a staff officer in the map caravan section, looked disgusted. Nevertheless he saluted and bowed in agreement, trying to keep his look free from irony. But the truth of the matter was that Von Esslin was rattled – events had outdistanced him and he had genuine difficulty in marshalling them into coherence. He hoped that he might soon find himself back on the Eastern Front – a vague sense of
malaise
haunted him, something at the heart of the French collapse. Nor did the cringing, hysterical reception afforded his men by the citizens of Paris do anything to allay his sense of disorientation. They kicked some police units out of their billets in Avalon and took possession of this sensitive entry to the capital. But pretty soon the general efficiency of their forces had carved out a reasonable way of living – which afforded Von Esslin frequent short leaves to Paris where he found that the girls eyed his uniform with great respect. Once a young
fille de joie
asked him if he would care to come with her and give her a good beating with his cane. She would consider paying him, she said, which was at least original. He was shocked, and contemptuous of the French race for taking their defeat so contentedly. He muttered some opprobrious epithet and hurried on over the bridge to the
quais
, where he found many German books which he bought and sent home to his mother. The mails were now getting through and he heard from her every month or so; in exchange he wrote to her to retail his adventures and to describe Paris, which he had always found so fascinating, and which was now, in defeat, almost more so.

When he had drunk a Cointreau or two he became flushed, heavily sentimental, and in these moods he would sometimes escort a street walker to her grubby lodgings. But the period in question was brief, like the withdrawal from the southern sector of France, and within a few months he found himself posted with his armour to Tulle – on the edge of the occupied zone which he himself had always been convinced could not co-exist peacefully with the occupied north. France was like a Christmas stocking – everything had been pushed down into it, refugees, Jews, criminals, and members of a hypothetical Resistance; not to mention the fact that the Allies were sending in agents the whole time in an attempt to gather information and to promote insurrection. It was rumoured that Von Esslin was to have a new command, and he pondered deeply whether it might not be something to do with the push into Russia, for nobody he knew had believed in the factitious pact that had been signed – it had been a manoeuvre to free a flank against Russian perfidy while France was dealt with. Nor could one be very much in doubt about future possibilities, for the armoured build-up in the north hinted of such preoccupations. Meanwhile, the absurd
drôle de guerre
had given place to an equally
drôle de paix!
The French really believed that it was only a matter of time before the two million French prisoners were released to them, to be accompanied perhaps by a general German withdrawal from the country after the signing of some sort of peace pact and the payment of an indemnity. It lingered on for months, this fatal misapprehension, in spite of the desert battles, the battles for Greece, Yugoslavia, and so on. People clustered round the symbol of a France which would retrieve her freedom and greatness, though the old Marshal Pétain, with his avuncular speeches and ineffectual acts, was hardly the man to inspire such hopes. Anti-British feeling was at its height, for the English by their ill-considered bombings and hostile activities risked upsetting the Germans who would then obviously punish the French civilians. In the midst of all this confused and incoherent sermonising they managed to establish for a few months a life as quiet as any seminarist’s, with frequent Paris leave for troops, Avalon being so near, and plenty of time to refit and rekit against the next round – whenever that might be.