To Lose a Battle (29 page)

As it was, by 24 April the situation had improved so much that Hitler could now once again turn his eyes back to the West. On 1 May, more good news prompted him to order that steps be taken so that
Sichelschnitt
could be launched at twenty-four hours’ notice at any time from 4 May.

Crises in France and Britain

If Norway led, among the German generals, to renewed confidence in their Führer, in both France and Britain it resulted in a major crisis of leadership. For Gamelin, the days of 12 and 13 April were ‘among the most painful of my existence’; on being summoned to a Cabinet meeting, he found ‘an atmosphere of ice. It was as though they had just pronounced “Bring in the accused!” ’ Following on the Finnish débâcle, public dissatisfaction had already brought about the fall of Gamelin’s protector, Daladier, replaced (on 21 March) by a new Cabinet under Paul Reynaud, who was no friend of the French Generalissimo.

When France went to war in 1914, her political parties had declared a truce, forming under the
Union Sacrée
a coalition almost unique in the history of France. Poincaré had possessed no love for Clemenceau, but out of patriotism was prepared to collaborate loyally with him; in 1939, although Léon Blum had declared that he would ally himself with anyone dedicated solely to winning the war, it was typical that at a dinner party where Clare Boothe was present, half the guests refused to shake hands with poor Blum. In war, the musical chairs of the Third Republic went on as dizzily as before. Shortly after its outbreak, Daladier had managed to purge the appeaser, Bonnet,
³
from the Quai d’Orsay, though he could not get rid of him altogether, and Bonnet had lingered on as Minister of Justice. Daladier then made an attempt at re-creating the
Union Sacrée
by bringing his old foe, Édouard Herriot, into the Government in Bonnet’s place. ‘Come, it is your duty,’ he is reputed to have said to Herriot. ‘At the Quai d’Orsay we need a faith, a doctrine, a capable head, endurance; in short, a man.’ Herriot retorted, ungraciously, ‘What for?’ but accepted with the proviso that he should be ‘covered’ by Pétain also entering the Cabinet. The old Marshal’s response to Daladier, however,
was: ‘I am at your orders. But veto Herriot.’ Thereafter Daladier was left with no alternative but to turn himself into a one-man band: Foreign Secretary, as well as Premier, Minister of National Defence and Minister of War.

The Cabinet swiftly divided itself into the ‘hards’, as represented by Paul Reynaud and Clemenceau’s former hatchetman, Georges Mandel, and the ‘softs’: Bonnet, de Monzie, Pomaret and Chautemps.
⁴
These ‘softs’ within the Cabinet represented but a small fraction of the various dissident groups, opposed to the war to some extent or other, with whom Daladier had to deal: Communists, anti-militarists of the non-Communist Left, conservatives fearful of revolution, the rich trembling for their riches, defeatists and pro-Fascists such as Pierre Laval, who, though still in outer darkness, wielded a potent influence upon the ‘softs’ within Daladier’s Cabinet. Meanwhile, above it all, the Head of State, who could perhaps have lent more teeth to France’s war-time Government, was manifestly senile; on visiting President Lebrun in the spring of 1940, Sumner Welles found his memory ‘failing rapidly. It was difficult for him to remember with any accuracy names, or dates, or even facts…’ He attempted ‘with a good deal of assistance’ to tell Welles about the various paintings in the Élysée, but ‘was quite unable to remember the names of any of them’.

Daladier

Daladier himself was neither strong nor prepossessing. A fifty-five-year-old widower and son of a baker from Vaucluse in the south, he had taught history before going into politics. He succeeded Herriot as leader of the Radical-Socialist Party in 1935, had been Minister of War almost uninterruptedly since 1932, and Premier both at the time of the Stavisky riots of 1934 and Munich, on each of which occasions he had capitulated to external pressures. Daladier was a stockily-built, energetic man with a dull-brown complexion and a greasy lock of hair that
imparted a slight (and deceptive) look of Bonaparte. Under the strain of the Popular Front, he had come to depend increasingly on the more fiery French liquors; writing in all the bitterness of 1940, Vincent Sheean describes him as ‘a dirty man with a cigarette stuck to his lower lip, stinking of absinthe, talking with a rough Marseillaise accent… He had a certain southern eloquence, particularly over the air when he could not be seen.’ While Daladier was still in power, Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary that he looked ‘like a drunken peasant. His face must once have had sharp outlines but now it is blurred by the puffiness of drink. He looks extremely exhausted and has the eyes of a man who has had a bad night. He has a weak, sly smile.’ In the south, his supporters nicknamed Daladier ‘the bull of Vaucluse’, but as Spears remarked acidly, ‘his horns bore more resemblance to the soft feelers of the snail than to the harder bovine variety’. Others said that his was a case of a ‘velvet hand in a glove of iron’, and certainly his rough appearance and violent fits of rage had given him a reputation for strength to which, as both Munich and the Stavisky riots had shown, he was hardly entitled. His strength, such as it was, lay in politics rather than in statecraft, and he excelled in the steamy jungles comprising the political lobbies of the Third Republic. To Pertinax, Daladier – honest but infirm and immensely jealous of his position –epitomized the average Frenchman of his time; he was ‘the image of the last decade of the Republic’. For a nation as reluctantly at war as France, he was certainly not a leader to impart inspiration; in his New Year’s Eve broadcast at the end of 1939, he expressed a desire to spread ‘a ray of joy’ in each home, but all he managed to do was propagate his own gloom. Yet as a political juggler capable of keeping the parties of the Third Republic in some sort of equilibrium, he was indispensable.

At the beginning of January 1940, Daladier took a weekend off to escape from the political pressures bearing down on him. He was out riding, when his horse slipped on frost-hardened ground and he fell, with his foot caught in the stirrup. For the next months he suffered constant pain and insomnia, which appear to have had their effect upon his control of the Government;
Senator Bardoux notes that when he saw Daladier on 6 March he was still limping and seemed ‘even wearier, sadder and less dynamic than a fortnight previously’, while grumbling ‘Nothing is going right.’ Flandin, whose Government had once fallen as a result of a car accident in which he broke his arm, commented caustically that ‘a politician has no right to have accidents’, and on 20 March Daladier fell again – this time politically. Pierre Laval launched the attack, while the killing blow was struck by a Deputy who cried tellingly: ‘The men who were able neither to prevent nor to prepare for war are not now qualified either to stop it or win it…’ After some talk about Daladier being succeded by such ‘softs’ as Chautemps, Laval, or Pétain, President Lebrun called for Paul Reynaud to form the one-hundred-and-ninth Government of the Third Republic.

Reynaud

Paul Reynaud was sixty-two when he came to power, for the first time. His family were farmers in the Basses-Alpes, but he had established himself as a successful barrister. He had acquired a connoisseur’s taste for Chinese art, and indeed there was something of the mandarin in his own appearance: dapper, sharp-featured, with eyebrows that seemed to be permanently raised in a quizzical expression. He was very fond of sport – walking, cycling and swimming – and he rather advertised the fact. But the important physical feature of Reynaud was his modest stature. He had most of the attributes of the small man: agility, combativeness, vulnerability to flatterers, the self-confidence that masks a sense of inferiority – and courage. His enemies (and they were many) called him ‘Mickey Mouse’. But to Maurois he was

a little fighting cock… I liked to see him, when a subject fired his imagination, get to his feet, put his hands in his pockets, throw back his head to raise his short figure to its full height, and hold forth in picturesque and biting phrases like quick hammer blows.

In debate he showed a brilliant, quick intellect and a devastating
logic; but he sought (says Élie Bois) ‘to master, not to charm’, and this with his natural assertiveness and love of battle did not endear him to other politicians of the Third Republic, especially to Daladier, who loathed him. Hardworking and intensely patriotic, Reynaud had never been afraid to swim against the current. From the earliest days he had warned France about Hitler’s designs, in opposition to the Flandins, Lavals and Bonnets, and it was he who had gone against official French military doctrine by taking up the views of de Gaulle. As Minister of Finance in 1938, he had achieved remarkable success in reordering France’s economy after the ravages of the Popular Front; but his tough measures had gained him many more enemies. From September 1939 he had pledged himself to total war against Hitler, though by the time he came to power it was a bit late, in so far as Hitler was himself on the brink of unleashing total war against France.

As the small voice in the French wilderness, Reynaud represented the equivalent of Churchill, whom he hugely admired; but unfortunately he possessed neither the essential grandeur nor the support. He also was too much a product of the Third Republic, had played the game of musical chairs to its limit, manoeuvring and counter-manoeuvring. More than this, because of the loneliness of the positions he adopted as well as his combative manner, in the Assembly he was a maverick; sitting in the centre, he possessed no party of his own, few intimates, and his judgement in choosing his political ‘friends’ was to prove far from impeccable. Thus, in contrast to the great
carte blanche
given to Churchill on his accession to power, Reynaud from the start was forced to compromise and tight-rope-walk in his formation of a government.

But by far the heaviest burden Paul Reynaud had to bear was his mistress, Madame Hélène de Portes. Ambitious, busy women have traditionally exercised a powerful influence behind the scenes of French politics. At the end of the 1930s, there were three who had dominated the stage of the Third Republic. There was Madame Bonnet, nicknamed ‘Madame
soutien-Georges
’; the Marquise de Crussol, a handsome and youthful-looking blonde who was Daladier’s Egeria and whom
the punsters christened ‘
la sardine qui s’est crue sole
’, on account of the family’s sardine-canning business; and Raynaud’s Comtesse Hélène de Portes, the most powerful of them all and regarded as almost too sinister to be granted a sobriquet, although the wits occasionally referred to her, aptly as ‘the side door’ – ‘
la porte à côté
’.

The extraordinary thing about Hélène de Portes is that, of the countless people who knew her, none can satisfactorily explain wherein lay her allure. The practised eye of General Spears describes her as having ‘very good feet and ankles, but her complexion was sallow. Of medium height, she was dark, her curly hair, brushed upwards, looked untidy… Her mouth was big and the voice that issued from it was unharmonious.’ Spears thought she dressed fashionably, but lacked ‘the attractiveness so often found in Parisiennes, that of being
bien soignée
’. Élie Bois, less vitriolic than most, observed in her a physical attribute which perhaps compensated for her lack of traditional beauty: ‘Her way of walking, quick of step, disclosed that the suppleness of her limbs and the agility of her whole body were maintained by physical exercise.’ But he thought her ‘ardent and ruthless in every way… a match for others at the game of secret slander’. However, he added, ‘she preferred direct attack, haughty, and even violent, for thereby her will to dominate could be more surely exercised’. Giving a woman’s view of Hélène de Portes, Clare Boothe saw her as ‘a dark, homely, talkative little woman, in her late forties. She looked as much like a
Hausfrau
as a French
maîtresse
can. She was patriotic, energetic; she had many friends and a lot of notions about everything.’ But to regard her as ‘the Du Barry of France’ was, she thought, as wide of the mark as calling ‘Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt the Cleopatra of the New Deal!’

What, then, was the secret of her hold over Reynaud? Most probably it resided in his small stature. As a Frenchman remarked to Harold Nicolson in 1941, ‘she made him feel tall and grand and powerful. Had Reynaud been three inches taller, the history of the world might have been changed.’ He needed and depended upon his Hélène, and thrived upon her flattery; she in her turn, dedicated to seeing her hero reach the top of
the political ladder, sustained him and goaded him in his own strong ambitions. Their relationship, as someone once remarked, was ‘far more like Diana clinging to her charger than Venus clutching her prey’.

In the aftermath of France’s defeat, Hélène de Portes came to be regarded by many as an out-and-out Fifth Columnist. Certainly before the war her famous salon had been frequently visited by Otto Abetz and members of the
Comité France–Allemagne
; she was never a ‘hard’ like Reynaud, and she was strongly anti-British, a tendency which increased as the war went progressively worse for France from 10 May onwards. But in retrospect it seems fair to judge that she was no more of a ‘Fifth Columnist’ than most of the patriotic but self-interested
haute bourgeoisie
whose shibboleth under the Popular Front had been ‘Rather Hitler than Blum!’ Perhaps the most baneful feature of her relationship with Paul Reynaud was that she held him totally her prisoner, and chivvied him relentlessly until he was simply worn out. Together they lived in Reynaud’s bachelor flat near the Assembly, where much business of state was transacted. She was constantly intervening and interfering, and even in his office Reynaud was never immune from her endless telephone calls. On at least one occasion Madame de Portes was to be found actually seated at his desk, presiding over a gathering of generals, deputies and government officials. Once when André Maurois criticized a political appointment made by his friend, Reynaud admitted: ‘It was not my choice, it was hers.’ Maurois replied: ‘That is no excuse.’ ‘Ah,’ sighed Reynaud, ‘you don’t know what a man who has been hard at work all day will put up with to make sure of an evening’s peace.’