To Lose a Battle (19 page)

‘Queer Kind of War…’

Whereas on the first day of war, people in France were saying ‘Let’s get it over with!’, Fabre-Luce recalls that on the tenth day they were remarking: ‘These affairs, one knows when they begin but not when they end.’ But on the twentieth day they confined themselves to the comment
‘Drôle de guerre…’
And so, for the next eight months, interpolated by periodic false alarms that Hitler was about to invade Belgium and Holland, the
drôle de guerre
– or what United States Senator Borah dubbed the ‘Phoney War’ – dragged dismally on. At sea, Britain hung her head in shame when, on 14 October, H.M.S.
Royal Oak
was torpedoed inside Scapa Flow; two months later the score was evened with the cornering of the
Graf Spee
off the River Plate. But on the Western Front action was limited to desultory patrol actions, carried out by volunteers, so-called
détachements francs,
a system hardly designed to improve the fighting qualities of the non-élite mass of the French Army. The Duke of Windsor visited Fort Hochwald, which honoured him by firing four shells into no-man’s-land; later there was champagne in the officers’ mess. Dorothy Thompson also came and was allowed to fire a ‘75’, while Clare Boothe ‘adopted’ a fort to which she sent cigarettes in exchange for a ‘brave flag’ embroidered in gold with those evocative words
‘Ils ne passeront pas!’
Visitors to the front were constantly astounded by the state of truce existing there. After a trip made to the German lines in October, Shirer wrote:

Where the train ran along the Rhine, we could see the French bunkers and at many places great mats behind which the French were building fortifications. Identical picture on the German side. The troops seemed to be observing an armistice… one blast from a French ‘75’ could have liquidated our train. The Germans were hauling up guns and supplies on the railroad line, but the French did not disturb them.

Queer kind of war…

Some five months later President Roosevelt’s peace emissary, Sumner Welles, noted the same picture. ‘There was not a sound
as we passed. Not even an aeroplane was seen in the sky.’ From the French side, the inactivity infuriated British war correspondents like Gordon Waterfield:

Across the river a young German was standing in the sun, naked to the waist, washing himself. It annoyed me that it should be possible for him to go on washing calmly there with two machine-guns on the opposite bank. I asked the French sentry why he did not fire. He seemed surprised at my bloodthirstiness.
‘Ils ne sont pas méchants’,
he said; ‘and if we fire they will fire back.’

That the enemy were
‘pas méchants’
became the keynote of the Phoney War, and it was a notion assiduously fostered by the Germans. When Strasbourg was being evacuated on the outbreak of war, they obligingly aided by turning on searchlights from their side of the river; for several months, power plants in the German Saar continued to supply French frontier villages with electricity. On the River Lauter, where the opposing troops used to do their washing in plain view of each other, there was a typical incident when a French soldier strayed over to the German side and was captured. This was immediately followed up by a note under flag of truce from his company commander, asking for his return; first, explained the French captain, the man’s capture was ‘against the custom’, and secondly his sector was so wide that he simply could not do without him! It was hardly surprising that, by 7 November, a French lieutenant, Claude Jamet, should be writing in his diary:
‘Et la guerre?
Frankly, one isn’t interested in it. One does not think of it. Does it really exist?’ When the bell of his fort sounded the warning of German aircraft, ‘instead of taking shelter, on the contrary one rushes out, nose in the air, dazzled by the sunshine and excited, making gestures like football supporters or race-track touts…’

After the initial fear had passed of the Luftwaffe air-raids which never materialized, life behind the lines in France resumed something very close to its normal course. In Paris the black-out remained sombrely effective, but once outside ‘the glare and dazzle of headlights was like returning from the Aldershot Tattoo’, remarked Anthony Gibbs. ‘Every shop in
St Germain and in the outskirts of Paris blazed to high heaven…’ In Brittany and the remoter provinces, Simone de Beauvoir reported how ‘Chic refugees cruise around in cars and complain about the lack of entertainment; what a mad twittering world they inhabit!’ Driven by their age-old dread of exile, the smart Parisians soon began to return to the capital. People were earning good money there, and spending it freely. Symbolically, the hit of the season was Maurice Chevalier’s
‘Paris reste Paris’.
But the psychological atmosphere was far from happy. In October, Simone de Beauvoir questioned in her diary: ‘What does the word “war” really mean? A month ago, when all the papers printed it boldly across their headlines, it meant a shapeless horror, something undefined but very real. Now it lacks all substance and identity…’

Some outside observers felt that the canker of Munich had gnawed deeply and ineradicably into the French soul. Janet Teissier du Cros, a Scotswoman married to a Frenchman serving in the Army, reflected:

I often wonder what the outcome would have been if we had fought instead of giving in over the Czechoslovakian crisis. I think the temper of France would have been very different. After the first moment of relief, Munich left people in France with a cynical taste in their mouths… There was no honour left in public life; all one could now do was to cling to what was left of private life. The door was open for the ‘realists’ who were to do so much harm…

Arthur Koestler agreed: ‘The cynicism of the Munich era,’ he declared, ‘destroyed any creed worth fighting for…’ And German Intelligence was well aware of this spirit.

To stave off boredom and lack of interest in the war, and to show
bonne volonté,
the Parisiennes busied themselves in good works of varying value to the war effort. In the Ritz, chic ladies in ‘simple black dresses’ shook tins for refugee relief and soldiers’ canteens, then (if it happened to be a ‘spiritless day’, of which there were three a week) took themselves off to a champagne lunch. The Red Cross and volunteer nursing organizations were womanned to excess; according to the cynical
Fabre-Luce, much as in 1870, ‘twenty thousand nurses and more were demanding the wounded. Some of them gave the impression of believing that the military authority was failing in its duties by not providing them…’
Le Jour
tried once again to institute
les marraines de guerre,
³
the good women who in 1914–18 had each adopted a
poilu
whose every need they endeavoured to fulfil. As it was, most already had their soldier ‘somewhere in France’ – that delightful euphemism of the censor much guyed in the music-halls – to whom they sent all manner of games, detective novels, drink and handkerchiefs.

Life at the Front

Despite all this attention, conditions at the front were by no means brilliant for the simple soldiers. Initially, there was an acute shortage of boots and blankets among some units; in the Second Army on the Sedan front, owing to the lack of proper billets, men slept in the stables with their horses. Where they were lodged out in villages, it was often found that the contagious influences of civilian life from which so many reservists had been lately uprooted had a debilitating effect on discipline. In sharp contrast to the more democratic Wehrmacht, French officers seemed to look after themselves much better than their men, with whom they had deplorably little contact. Although the wearing of helmet, gas-mask and belt was obligatory at the front, officers were often to be seen strolling around in service caps, jackets unbuttoned, hands in pockets and cigarettes dangling from their lips. An American canteen worker who had been a nurse with the French Army in 1917 was shocked by the sleekly well-groomed officers, with their ‘well-polished nails and brilliantined hair, compared with the soldiers in their grubby barracks and the dreary canteens in which they could spend their fifty centimes a day’.
⁴
Somehow the
poilu
’s pay had improved little over the scandalous wages for which he fought and died in 1914–18, and family emoluments were equally poor: a
wife with two children, for instance, though living rent-free, received only 16 francs a day in the provinces and 21 francs in Paris. Soldiers would often use their ten days’ leave to drive a taxi-cab in Paris, or run errands so as to make a little more money for their dependants. The officers, however, seemed somehow to manage to carry on with their civilian business, wangle official ‘missions’ to their home towns, run their own cars in the prohibited ‘Zone of Armies’, and even keep wives and mistresses in lodgings there. At least, so the stories went; and they were as implicitly believed as that hoary chestnut common to bored soldiers in all armies of the world – namely that men on leave from the front had it spoilt because their potency had been diminished by the bromides with which their officers laced the issue of wine. And, as the Phoney War dragged on, leave was the one thing the French soldier really cared about.

To add to the harsh conspiracy of Fate against France, the winter of 1939 turned out to be the coldest in nearly half a century. The English Channel froze at Dungeness and Folkestone. Germany suffered too; clothes rationing came into force, causing, noted Shirer, ‘many long German faces’. The bitter cold and an incipient coal shortage made Christmas in Berlin particularly bleak that year: ‘few presents, Spartan food, the menfolk away, the streets blacked out, the shutters and curtains drawn tight… the Germans feel the difference to-night. They are glum, depressed, sad…’ But for France the Arctic conditions were particularly undesirable; apart from their effect on military morale, they severely curtailed training and work on those neglected defences stretching from Longwy to the sea.

A French soldier described the lonely monotony of guard duty at an advance post of the Maginot Line during the bitter winter: ‘Before you, an unknown countryside, a black night. The nearest post is several hundred yards away. Your feet are frozen in their stiff boots. Your helmet weighs heavily. Your eyes are tired from looking without seeing.’ Night after night, the same meaningless vigil. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months.
Le Rire
printed a cartoon showing two
poilus,
one white-bearded and bedecked with many First War medals,
telling the younger: ‘It all began in the time of my grandfather, but no one any longer knows why.’ As the winter dragged on, the whole Army became chronically tainted with that most pernicious of Gallic diseases – boredom. Commented Fabre-Luce with his customary acridity: ‘We’re no longer fighting the Germans, we’re fighting
ennui.
’ By comparison with the French sectors of the front, visitors to the B.E.F. tended to remark on the constant bustle of activity even during the period of worst weather. Possibly much of this activity may have been senseless, of the order of digging holes then refilling them, but at least it preserved the B.E.F. from the boredom gnawing at the French. General Spears, so closely acquainted with the French Army at the time of the 1917 mutinies, in which neglect of the troops’ welfare had played no inconsiderable part, noted – in contrast to the B.E.F. – the same neglect once again. He found the scenes at the French front ‘horribly depressing’. And the ‘unfathomable, limitless boredom’ he saw there was hardly conducive to maintaining good morale.

French Army Morale

Disquieting symptoms of the state of morale in the French Army began to reveal themselves in various ways. In many units discipline left much to be desired; men did not salute their officers, and the officers often failed to exact such ‘external marks of respect’. This seemed to be particularly the fault of the reservist officers: ‘The events of 1936 had perhaps caused them to lose in civil life the habit of being obeyed,’ suggested Marcel Lerecouvreux of the 2nd Cavalry Division, and – whether right or wrong – his was a view widely shared among the French officer corps. With horror Lerecouvreux recalled how he observed the sentry of a neighbouring unit, charged with guarding the demolition charges placed under a Meuse bridge, quietly abandon his post and his rifle to assist his mate fishing some fifty yards away. Another aspect of indiscipline manifested itself in the widespread pillaging of the evacuated areas; according to Lieutenant Jamet, serving with the Third Army, ‘the Gendarmerie reports are overwhelming. Here, there
are acts of vandalism; wherever the zouaves have passed, for example, not a piece of furniture remains upright; everything that could not be drunk or stolen has been smashed…’ Already by the end of September six soldiers were reported to have been shot for pillaging villages near the Maginot Line.

Just as it had done during the Siege of Paris in 1870, alcoholism became a concomitant of boredom. ‘The first reaction of the authorities’ surprise by the onslaught of boredom,’ noted Fabre-Luce, ‘was to prolong the licensing hours.’ The resultant drunkenness in the Army soon grew to be a serious headache; as General Ruby of Huntziger’s Second Army wrote, ‘the sight of our men in railway stations was not always comforting… in larger stations special rooms had to be prepared, euphemistically known as “disethylation rooms”…’ Another disturbing phenomenon was the increasing number of young and healthy officers prepared to go to any length to get a staff job, away from the dreariness of life in the front-line cantonments, whereas in 1914–18 anyone appointed to the staff, unless badly wounded, was in danger of being condemned as an
embusqué
– a shirker. With no General Staff escape-hatch open to them, the simple soldiers registered their discontent in the steady growth of ‘French leave’.
⁵
‘Without permission, secretly at first, and soon almost openly, they went away Saturday at midday, sometimes in the morning, to reappear Sunday evening, Monday morning, or even Monday at midday,’ writes General Menu. Threats of discipline seemed to have little effect. Even President Lebrun, who had fought at Verdun, shook his head sadly after his visits to the front: ‘I seemed to encounter slackened resolve, relaxed discipline. There one no longer breathed the pure and enlivening air of the trenches of 1914–18.’