To Lose a Battle (20 page)

Meanwhile, Lieutenant-General Alan Brooke, then commanding the B.E.F.’s II Corps and later to become Churchill’s Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1941 onwards, in whom the listlessness of the troops he had seen on the Belgian frontier had early aroused ‘most unpleasant apprehensions as to the fighting qualities of the French in this new war’, put his
finger on a different, though perhaps equally undesirable, psychological factor within the Maginot Line – complacency. To the critical Brooke, the Line ‘reminded me of a battleship built on land, a masterpiece in its way… And yet! It gives me but little feeling of security.’ Living in far greater comfort than the troops billeted outside in the mud and ice, the guardians of
le trou
maintained a higher morale; but, as Brooke noted prophetically in his diary of 6 February 1940,

the most dangerous aspect is the psychological one; a sense of false security is engendered, a feeling of sitting behind an impregnable iron fence; and should the fence perchance be broken, the French fighting spirit might well be brought crumbling with it.

Apart from boredom and the impact of winter, there were certain other readily identifiable viruses sapping military morale. There was the singularly discouraging effect of the repeated ‘false alarms’. On 12 January, for example, Major Barlone, serving in Blanchard’s First Army, recorded in his diary: ‘All leave suspended… the entry of the Germans into Belgium is considered imminent… All the men, roused from their sleep on an intensely cold night, are full of enthusiasm for the idea of going to fight the Germans at long last…’; but six days later: ‘The “stand-by” is now at an end… our men are very disappointed…’ There was the sense of resentment that for the ‘civvies’ behind the lines life should continue apparently unaffected by the war, while at the front the troops were suffering all the discomforts, the dislocation of their professional and private lives that war brings – and yet enjoying none of its excitements or glory. There was also bitterness at the way Britain seemed to have pushed France into the war and then – while France had fully mobilized her forces – continued to submit herself to only partial conscription. With no more than a handful of B.E.F. divisions sent to hold the line, this French grievance was certainly not without justification.

Finally, what was the
point
of the war? Since the fall of Poland, no kind of declaration of war aims had been put out by either the British or French Government. Why not? Lerecouvreux notes that the question ‘Why are we fighting?’ was
constantly raised by the troops, but it was ‘never answered by the officers, nor did they ever attempt it. By comparison, in 1914, it was quite simple: “We are fighting because we have been attacked and in order to retake Alsace and Lorraine.” ’ Yet although the French High Command must have been well aware how much lower morale was than in 1914, and of its causes, it did absolutely nothing about it – even to the extent of trying to improve the deplorable mail service; its inefficiency at the beginning of the war meant some troops remaining six weeks without news of their families. Perhaps the reason for inertia lay in Gamelin’s subsequent mild apologia: ‘I realize that as I spent my time exclusively with staff officers, I was not in sufficiently close touch with the spirit of the country and the troops.’

The Propaganda War

In its state of boredom and malaise, the French Army was eminently susceptible to the propaganda directed at it by Dr Goebbels and his experts. Throughout the Phoney War, each side made up for the lack of shells it fired at the other by a constant barrage of words. Across the Rhine, huge rival hoardings and loudspeakers confronted one another. French troops did not fire on the enemy’s artifices by order; the Germans reciprocated, possibly because they found French propaganda so utterly risible. Its general tenor was to be found in the posters plastered all over France which contained a map of the world displaying the vast areas covered by the French and British Empires, overprinted with the slogan ‘We shall win because we are the stronger.’ This was backed up by attributing, each month, some new project of conquest to the Germans; when nothing happened, an Allied victory was then claimed. Another popular line widely disseminated, both for internal and external consumption, was Daladier’s boast at the beginning of 1940: ‘In 1914, we suffered 100,000 killed during the first four months. This time we have only lost 2,000’; while steady favourites were the themes that Germany was either on the brink of revolution, or of starvation induced by the Royal Navy’s blockade.
Hardly less fantastical was the story recorded by Clare Boothe, much publicized by the French Press, of a miraculous spring in Lorraine which evidently ‘started flowing exactly three months before the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. It flowed again in August 1918. On February 19th, 1940, the miraculous spring began to flow once more. “Will Germany collapse by the end of May?” asked the papers.’ If most of the French propaganda seemed insulting to so intelligent a people, to Allied sympathizers among the neutrals in Germany its sheer grotesqueness was one of the most depressing features of life.

We heard over
Paris Mondiale
[wrote Joseph Harsch from Berlin] that Berlin was on the verge of starvation, and then went out and ate meals at any one of a dozen Berlin restaurants which were all a man could eat… We read in copies of English newspapers which came through the American Embassy that the German Army was undertrained… that it still employed the technique of the mass charge of herds of men with officers driving them forward from behind…

On the other hand, German propaganda was adroit, direct and immensely effective. It was based on three hypotheses: the Frenchman’s lack of interest in the war, his hereditary dislike and distrust of ‘perfidious Albion’, and the damage done to an already divided France by the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact. Again and again it pounded out the simple, torpor-inducing theme which increasingly reflected the wishes of a large portion of the French Army: ‘You remain in your Maginot Line, we will stay in the West Wall.’ Undoubtedly the most accomplished performer in the propaganda war was Otto Abetz’s old ally, Paul Ferdonnet, who had run off to Germany and whose ‘Lord Haw-Haw’-style broadcasts earned him the sobriquet ‘the traitor of Stuttgart’. He shocked French troops by his extraordinary knowledge of their movements. René Balbaud noted how in December Ferdonnet announced that his division was going back to rest, giving the identity of the division due to replace it; both quite correctly. On another occasion, he warned a certain corps commander that the wives and mistresses of officers under his command were joining them for the weekend
in nearby towns. The general’s inquiries proved Ferdonnet to be quite right. Ferdonnet’s slogans, such as
‘Les Anglais donnent leurs machines, les Français donnent leurs poitrines
’, stuck easily in the mind. Over the radio and their frontier loudspeakers, the Germans played cunningly on the French love of music; Gaston Palewski, then an Air Force officer and later a leading Gaullist, admitted to the author that the programmes piped from Germany used to be far and away the best the French forces could receive. Then would come the slogans: ‘Don’t transform France into a vast field of battle… don’t listen to perfidious England… Your feet are cold in this mud…
La France aux Français!’
Then some more of Tino Rossi singing
Marinella.
Meanwhile, crudely pungent cartoons would flutter down from aircraft; in November, Lieutenant Jamet picked up one, entitled ‘The Bloodbath’. The first picture showed a little Frenchman and a large, pipe-smoking ‘Tommy’ standing on the edge of a blood-filled pond; in the second, the two were preparing to jump in, but the third revealed that the Frenchman alone had dived, leaving the Tommy standing on the bank; in the fourth, the Frenchman was up to his neck in blood while his ally walked away laughing. Another cartoon, which struck a lively chord, depicted British officers in Paris fondling half-naked women while a
poilu
kept watch in the Maginot Line. Occasionally this kind of meretricious appeal backfired; General Spears relates how the Germans once put up an enormous hoarding, informing ‘soldiers of the Northern Provinces’ that the licentious British soldiery was ‘sleeping with your wives, raping your daughters’. But the French regiment opposite promptly riposted: ‘We don’t give a bugger, we’re from the South!’

There was, however, no mistaking the impact made by this artful propaganda onslaught. Already by mid November, Jamet noted down in his diary that the common catchword had become ‘Have you seen the English?’, adding that ‘Anglophobia seems to be almost universal in the French Army.’ Meanwhile, behind the lines, while the Government had been prompt to ban Communist newspapers on the outbreak of war, such crypto-Fascist organs as
Je Suis Partout
and
Le Petit Parisien
continued to flourish with their blatantly anti-British, anti-semitic lines. Neville Chamberlain was depicted as being in the hands of the war-lusting British Jewry, while cartoons of British soldiers, philandering with French wives and sweethearts as their men drilled for ten
sous
a day appeared under captions identical to those showered down in German leaflets.

In all the German armoury of psychological warfare against France there was, however, no weapon of greater potency than that with which – at the end of August 1939 – Hitler had been presented by the non-aggression pact with Stalin. To many intelligent non-Marxist Frenchmen, mindful of how vital Russia’s assistance had been in 1914, hopes of victory had vanished with her defection to the Nazi camp; the leadership of the Communist Party, however, had been just as paralysed by the brutal shock of the Kremlin’s
volte-face.
For a month, during which Stalin was cynically grabbing his share of the Polish booty, the Communist Party awaited new orders. Meanwhile, it was forced to perform, in the eyes of Arthur Koestler, like ‘one of those conjurers on the stage who can produce an egg from every pocket’. The first consequences were the physical dissolution of the last bonds of the Popular Front – though its effects were still felt. On 25 September, the C.G.T. broke once again with the Communists. Léon Blum, who, however misguided in the past, was a patriot through and through, stood squarely behind the war effort and renounced his former allies. ‘They are defeatists,’ he declared, adding sadly: ‘We can’t deal with these people at all. I know them well – there is nobody who has been more thoroughly fooled by them than I have…’ From the ranks of the Communist Party itself, during the first three months of the war, twenty-one Deputies and one Senator quit in disgust, as well as a large number of mayors, councillors and trade unionists. Into Party H.Q. flowed telegrams such as the following: ‘Since Polish invasion, consequence of Hitler–Stalin Pact, await your condemnation in vain…’ The Party suffered a severe setback. But the great accretion of power and tactical experience gained during the period of the Popular Front enabled it to survive, much aided by the maladroitness of Daladier’s Government.

On 27 September the French Government decreed the dissolution of the Communist Party. Between 5 and 10 October, thirty-five of its Deputies were locked up, Thorez (having deserted from the Army to avoid arrest) was deprived of his citizenship,
L’Humanité
was closed down, and youths were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for circulating Communist pamphlets. Ilya Ehrenburg, the
Pravda
correspondent, complained that ‘in reality the bourgeois was taking its revenge on the workers for the fear they had inspired in 1936’, and indeed the fact that throughout the Phoney War no comparable attempt was ever made to round up the Right wing’s pro-Nazi sympathizers, or to close down such malevolent rags as
Le Petit Parisien,
did lend force to his assertion. Measures against the Communists bore a strong resemblance to the fear-inspired ‘spy-mania’ which had swept Paris in 1870, and again in 1914. Together with the known Communists, the police in their zeal arrested thousands of non-Communist ‘suspicious’ foreigners, many of whom, dedicated anti-Nazis, were themselves refugees from Hitler’s concentration camps. Arthur Koestler, among those rounded up, describes the French concentration camps into which these unfortunate ‘scum of the earth’ were flung as being ‘even below the level’ of those from which they had escaped in Germany; about the only difference was that ‘in Vernet people were killed for lack of medical attention; in Dachau they were killed on purpose’. It took the inmates of Vernet a long time to understand ‘this general and puzzling outburst of hatred against those who had been the first to fight the common enemy’, says Koestler, ‘and when we understood it, it laid bare one of the main psychological factors which finally led to the suicide of France.’

Of the French Communists he met during his internment, Koestler remarks how they represented several million of ‘the toughest, most active and most violently anti-Nazi part of the French working class… the best fitted to give an example of comradeship and reckless sacrifice in the struggle’. In their state of utter bewilderment and disillusion at Stalin’s
volte-face,
they could have been wooed to join in the common crusade against Nazism. ‘It was murderous stupidity on the part of the French
Government,’ argues Koestler, ‘to start a police pogrom against the Communist rank and file, instead of seizing this unique opportunity to win them over.’ Oppression of the Communists and martyrdom of its leaders did in fact only help close the ranks of the party; nothing could have rendered it greater service than the banning of
L’Humanité
and
Ce Soir,
as Léon Blum for one realized. Already by the end of October 1939,
L’Humanité
was beginning to appear illicitly, while with great effectiveness Thorez continued to direct the Party, clandestinely, from a refuge in Belgium.

On 1 October 1939, Édouard Herriot, the Radical Socialist President of the Assembly, received a letter from the banned Communist Deputies, urging that Hitler’s ‘peace proposals’ be seriously examined by the Government. This marked the formulation of Moscow’s new policy for the French Communist Party: all-out resistance to the continuation of the war. Later a tract by Georgi Dimitrov, the powerful Secretary of the Comintern, calling for an end to this ‘war of plunder’, was passed by hand from factory to factory, as well as being widely distributed among the French Army. On Armistice Day 1939, Communist peace pamphlets appeared demanding ‘Who in France would want to fight to reconstitute a Poland of reactionary and Fascist colonels?’ Others found in factories at this time proclaimed in one breath
‘Vive Stalin! Vive Hitler!’
Constant play was made of the theme that, for the French proletariat, there remained but one enemy, the bourgeoisie. ‘Away with this Government of misery and servility to the bankers of the City of London!’ cried another pamphlet. For Communist propaganda, as for Goebbels, Britain provided target number one. Always trying to create hostility between French and British troops, it harped upon the differences in pay between the two armies. As late as May Day 1940, when the German
Blitzkrieg
was poised for its lunge into the Low Countries, the Communists launched a last offensive against the ‘imperialist war’, in which, among other things, they charged France with having descended to the rank of a ‘British Dominion’.