To Lose a Battle (12 page)

The training of German youth, both within the new Wehrmacht and, earlier, in various para-military organizations, was
in itself revolutionary. Their regimented education began at a tender age. At ten they entered the
Jungvolk
, pledging ‘to devote all my energies and my strength to the saviour of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give up my life for him so help me God.’ At twelve, the most outstanding members of the
Jungvolk
were picked out to be dispatched to special schools for the instruction of élite cadres. The emphasis here, as everywhere else under the Nazis’ educational system, was strongly on physical culture and disciplined teamwork; among other preliminary military training, the boys also received courses in parachute jumping. At fourteen young Germans became eligible to join the vast body of the Hitler Youth itself. In 1936, a law was passed closely co-ordinating the Hitler Youth with the Wehrmacht; from local units, its members received instruction in marksmanship and leadership, visited Army barracks and were taken to watch manoeuvres. One of the liaison officers organizing these programmes was a certain Lieutenant-Colonel Erwin Rommel. At eighteen, youths became of age for conscription into the Wehrmacht or the
Arbeitsdienst
(Labour Service). Inside the
Arbeitsdienst
, while young Germans served their country by building roads and barracks, the work of inseminating corporate consciousness and para-military discipline and of preaching the essential classlessness of the New Order continued. Then, for vacation times, there was the Nazi ‘Strength through Joy’ welfare organization to provide still further regimented
Kameradschaft.
There was no mistaking the enthusiasm of the recipients of this massive indoctrination; even a dispassionate British journalist
⁵
studying ‘these young Germans of 1933’ was deeply impressed (as indeed were so many other observers at the time) by the

tremendous sense of comradeship amongst themselves. They were happy to learn together, play together, march together and to learn to fight together. They loved the open air and they flung away clothes from them with an abandon which would have horrified the Victorian generation… Their animal energy was gigantic.

By the time they reached the Wehrmacht, these spartan, dedicated
youths were already superlative material for a ‘revolutionary’ force, instinctively versed in the one craft which was to pay off in Germany’s early military operations more than any other – teamwork.

Anti-militarism in France

By comparison, what contrast one may glimpse in the spirit of France of the mid-1930s! The last of those rosy post-war illusions had been roughly swept aside by the revelation of her impotence during the Rhineland crisis; the urge for national
grandeur
, the desire for supremacy in Europe, were replaced by a deep longing simply to be left in peace. It was a longing widely diffused through all strata of French society, though of course the symptoms were paralleled in, and stimulated by, the mood prevailing in the England of Cliveden and Lansbury, the Peace Ballot and the Peace Pledge Union. But in France particularly the instinct for peace, or for what was later to become stigmatized as ‘appeasement’, remained strongly rooted in memories of the dreadfulness of the Great War, memories which, perhaps perversely, had become more rather than less potent with the passage of the years. This was to a large extent a consequence of the spate of anti-war literature which had swept Europe in the late 1920s, all telling basically the same tale of the horror and wastefulness of war, combined with the cynical callousness and sheer incompetence of the war leaders. In Germany, Hitler had been swift to stifle such books as Remarque’s
All Quiet on the Western Front
, but in France the terrifying novel of Henri Barbusse,
Le Feu
, had an immeasurable impact. For the Verdun generation, here indeed was an indelible reminder of what it had really been like; for their juniors, a nightmare fantasy the re-enactment of which must be avoided at all costs. Wielding enormous intellectual influence were various anti-war associations formed by such giants of France’s literary Left wing as André Gide, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon and Romain Rolland. But Barbusse was the torch-bearer; when he died in 1935 more than 300,000 followed his coffin to Père Lachaise Cemetery.

With his instinctive genius, Hitler knew well how to play on French fears and hopes, accompanying each new adventure with barrages of peace propaganda and repeated pledges of renunciation of any claim to Alsace-Lorraine, aimed at making Frenchmen sleep all the more comfortably at night behind the safety of their Maginot Line. With the vileness of the concentration camps yet to come, the full menace of the New Order only apparent when it would already be too late to check, Hitler did not seem especially malignant to the average Frenchman. Besides, as will be seen shortly, there were other dangers much closer to home. What hatred and fear of the Nazis there existed were roughly balanced out by equal hatred and fear of war itself.

So often in history when the unpleasantness of external reality induces a state of emotional confusion, societies become irresistibly tempted to bury themselves in all manner of imaginary pleasure and internal distractions. The louder the barbarians outside hammered at the walls of Rome, the wilder grew the public diversions in the Colosseum and the private orgies within the walls. At many levels of French life during the late 1920s and 1930s, escapism reveals itself as the ruling factor. Dadaism and surrealism in art are matched by the
fantaisiste
, fairy-tale world of Cocteau and Giraudoux. The frenzy of the fox-trot
dansomanie
of the 1920s marches with the stage extravaganzas of Diaghilev; the
Ballet Russe
, the
Ballet Suédois
; Josephine Baker, the
Revue Nègre.
Anything for ‘spectacle’. The circus is rediscovered. Then France suddenly finds she can play tennis and rugger; to be able to beat England provides a welcome sop to the Quai d’Orsay’s growing dependence upon the Foreign Office. The sporting pages of
Paris-Soir
make it overnight the journalistic success story of the decade. Bicycling is all the rage; for the masses, the Tour de France supplies the nearest emotional equivalent to Germany’s Nuremberg Rallies. In the cabarets, even the sacred fetishes of pre-1914 can be made mock of, with bearded ladies from Alsace chanting melodramatically:

No, no, a thousand times no! My breast is French,
I shall never give suck to a German child…

In literature, the passion for romantic travel, so powerful in the 1920s, gives way to an equal fascination in the personal ‘heroic quest’ of the agonizing man of action, as represented by such adventures as Saint-Exupéry and Malraux.

Despite its philosophy of ‘engagement’, no form of literature demonstrated a greater revolt away from reality than the existentialism of young Jean-Paul Sartre and his fellow inmates of the Café Flore in the latter 1930s. In her autobiography, Sartre’s mistress, Simone de Beauvoir, furnishes a revealingly honest chronicle of the attitude of French left-wing intellectuals. The autumn of 1929 had made her feel she was living in a new ‘Golden Age’: ‘Peace seemed finally assured; the expansion of the German Nazi Party was a mere fringe phenomenon, without any serious significance… It would not be long before colonialism folded up.’ Of Hitler’s coming to power in 1933, she writes: ‘…like everyone else on the French Left, we watched these developments quite calmly’, and in the same breath that she records, in passing, Einstein’s flight from Germany, she deplores the closing-down of the German ‘Institute of Sexology’. Still, ‘there was no threat to peace; the only danger was the panic that the Right was attempting to spread in France, with the aim of dragging us into war’. To the ‘elders’ of the Left, as to so many of that generation, ‘the memory of the 1914–18 was stuck in their throats… In 1914 the whole of the intellectual élite, Socialists, writers and all – no wonder Jaurès was assassinated – toed a wholly chauvinistic line… Our elders, then, forbade us to envisage the very possibility of a war…’ In their filmgoing, this dread of war led Sartre and Beauvoir to miss Renoir’s classic,
La Grande Illusion
, by preference seeking escapism in such American farces as
My Man Godfrey
and
Mr Deeds Goes to Town.

Political Scandals

At the important elections of 1936, after Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland, Sartre had refused to vote: ‘The political aspirations of left-wing intellectuals made him shrug his shoulders.’ Yet while regarding the French political scene with ‘disengaged’
aversion, and finding nothing ‘to stir my interest’ in the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and the French Foreign Minister, Barthou, Simone de Beauvoir concedes at the same time that ‘both Sartre and I read every word’ of the latest turn in the Stavisky scandal. This duality of attitudes extended far beyond the narrow circle of the Café Flore. Upon the futility of the Third Republic’s political jungle had now become superimposed (though perhaps ‘grafted’ is the better word) a miasma of corruption cases. The first big shock came in 1928 with the arrest of Klotz, the former Minister of Finance about whom Clemenceau had been so scathing, on charges of issuing dud cheques. Two years later there followed the Oustric scandal. Oustric had built up a bogus banking empire largely propped up on vast loans somehow obtained from the Bank of France; when his empire crashed, the involvement of the second Tardieu Government was sufficient to bring about its fall too.

But the greatest furore was caused by Serge Stavisky, the son of a Ukrainian-Jewish dentist, a seductive young man with an apparently limitless number of useful contacts in politics, the Press and the judiciary. Already by 1933 his financial operations had come under official scrutiny, but he appeared to be immune from police interference and a criminal case against him had actually been postponed nineteen times. It so happened that the public prosecutor who was failing to bring Stavisky to justice was the brother-in-law of the current Prime Minister, Camille Chautemps. Then suddenly, on 30 December, a major fraud, concerning the issue of millions of francs based on the assets of a municipal pawnshop in the small town of Bayonne, was pinned on Stavisky. The Mayor of Bayonne, Garat, who was also a Radical Deputy, was arrested, but the indications were that much bigger game was involved. How else had Stavisky managed to pull off such swindles, and how had he evaded justice for so long? Before any answers could be provided, the police found Stavisky dead in a house in Chamonix where he had been hiding with his mistress. Suicide was alleged, but it was widely believed that he had been shot by a policeman – conveniently, it seemed, for Chautemps. Overnight Stavisky became the best-known name in France since Dreyfus.
Crowds appeared outside the National Assembly, shouting ‘Down with the thieves!’ and spitting on Deputies. On 27 January 1934, the Chautemps Government fell – after an innings of just two months and four days.

In common with Sartre and Beauvoir, the great mass of Frenchmen indulged themselves heartily in the spectacle of political scandals as part of the nation’s pursuit of escapism. Hand in hand with this indulgence went a deep disgust and disillusion with politicians and government, which was about to create a grave split in France just at the moment when the Nazi jackboots were striding out in mounting unison. By 1934 the reputation of politicians in France had sunk to a record low; but it was to sink still lower, and with it all efficacy of government. Constantly there was some new scandal and, however distantly, some Minister in what the cynics dubbed ‘the Republic of Pals’ always seemed to be implicated. As Pertinax pungently observed, French politicians had assumed the habit of ‘dealing with their country as if it were a commercial company going into liquidation’. Recounting a typical scene of the Third Republic, Élie Bois describes how at a lunch party Georges Bonnet and Camille Chautemps ‘vied with one another to succeed a Premier whose ministry had just fallen: “It’s my turn!” “No, Georges, it’s mine…” ’ Dizzier and dizzier became the game of musical chairs played by the little men unaware of the proportions of the tragedy moving in on them. In the eighteen months preceding 1934, there had been five different governments but with virtually the same faces in each; from mid 1932 to the outbreak of war in 1939, France’s score of governments was to total nineteen, including eleven different Premiers, eight Ministers of Finance, seven Ministers of Foreign Affairs, and eight Ministers of War. A favourite insult with Parisian taxi-drivers became ‘
Espèce de député
’!’ The populace loathed the politicians; the politicians loathed each other.

Beginnings of Civil War

On 6 February 1934, passions overflowed. This was the date
marking the beginning of what approximated to civil war in France, which was to have so insidious and powerful an influence on the events of 1940 that its background needs to be carefully understood. Since Armistice Day 1918, two major ideological streams, distinct and opposing, had flowed through the political life of France. One was revolutionary, the other patriotic; or, simplified in terms of the two historic events which supplied each with its most potent, fundamental inspiration, they might well be called, respectively, the streams of the Commune and of Verdun. The revolutionary, Commune stream may trace its original source back to the Great Revolution of 1789, whose spiritual heirs fought against the Establishment on the barricades in 1830 and 1848; while, as has already been suggested, its main motivating force in the post-1918 world was derived from the Russian Revolution. But it was the Paris Commune of 1871 in which resided the numen of France’s Left wing, and especially of that important section comprised by the Parisian proletariat. It was the Commune which, though unsuccessful, had first pointed the way to the possibility of a Government of the proletariat, based on revolution and the destruction of the bourgeois monopoly; moreover, it was upon the achievements and errors of the Commune (as interpreted by Karl Marx) that Lenin had based his own triumphant revolution of 1917. Above all, in France it was the savage memories of the 20,000 Communards so brutally massacred by Thiers’s forces of order which kept alight the flame of revolution, making the gulf between bourgeois and proletarian wider and more unbridgeable than in any other nation of the Western world. The link with the Commune has never been severed; in the 1930s (and still today), every Whitsun the leaders of France’s Left wing made a solemn pilgrimage to the Mur des Fédérés at Père Lachaise Cemetery, to commemorate the summary execution there on 28 May 1871 of 147 Communards. The
Internationale
was their marching song, but the wall was the shrine to which they marched.