To Lose a Battle (88 page)

In these last terrible days, the quality of resistance was mixed.
But perhaps it was almost miraculous that, under the circumstances, soldiers could be persuaded to fight at all. At Vierzon, it is said, a tank officer wanting to defend the city was lynched by angry burghers. There were signs of mutiny in some units, while disbanded soldiers were reported to be robbing passers-by in the forests near Paris. There were also revelations that, whether through incompetence or lack of will, France had never reached right down into the depths of her military potential. As the Germans advanced, they came upon huge depots of weapons, ammunition, clothing, fuel and even new tanks which appear, inexplicably, never to have reached the armies. At the same time Spears, on his way to the Government’s final resting place at Bordeaux, wondered angrily at the fact that ‘nearly all the towns and villages I passed through were full of gaping, idle soldiers… How came it then that we were constantly told that all resources and man-power had been exhausted?’ The validity of such reproaches may never be determined. Yet amid all the adverse accounts from these days of France’s expiring agony, one episode at least will always leap forth from French history books in a blaze of glory, the kind of glory belonging almost to a past age. On 19 June, the day Pétain was asking for an armistice, Bock’s Panzers had reached Saumur on the Loire, the site of the famous cavalry school. Though still under instruction, the young cadets decided that they would not allow the school to fall without a fight. Armed only with training weapons, they held the Saumur bridges for two whole days against Panzers, until at last their ammunition ran out.

Doubtless there were other such epics of hopeless heroism, which will never now be recognized.

The Politicians: Last Resistance

While the German mobile columns were thrusting and tearing into the entrails of France, branching and re-branching like the tendrils of some rampant fungus or a nightmare man-eating plant, a bitter political struggle was being waged within Allied councils. Though forced to be more or less an impotent
spectator at this stage of France’s agony, Britain’s position was a relatively simple one. Every hour that France remained in the fight delayed the German invasion of Britain by an hour – an hour in which Britain would be rearming herself to meet the attack. Should not the undefeated French armies withdraw into a Breton redoubt, where, supplied by the Royal Navy, they could hold out until, in due course, new armies from Britain, the Empire and possibly America came to their aid? Or if all hope failed in metropolitan France, would not the French Government and what remained of the army transfer itself to North Africa, there to recuperate behind the joint shield of the French and British Navies? These were the anxious hopes of Britain. But above all, Churchill and his Government were concerned at the fate of the French fleet. If this were to fall into enemy hands, it would mean the end for Britain, the end for everybody.

On 11 June, Churchill made his fourth visit to France, in response to an urgent summons from Reynaud, who had just established himself at Tours. The meeting itself was at Briare; among those present were, as usual, Pétain and Weygand, and – for the first time – General de Gaulle, whom Reynaud had brought into his Cabinet from the front line in an attempt to strengthen his position against the ‘softs’. With the exception of the calmly phlegmatic de Gaulle, Spears recalls that

The Frenchmen sat with set white faces, their eyes on the table. They looked for all the world like prisoners hauled up from some deep dungeon to hear an inevitable verdict.

Churchill at once urged that Paris be defended: ‘I emphasized the enormous absorbing power of the house-to-house defence of a great city upon an invading army.’ Weygand countered by demanding that every available British fighter squadron be thrown into the battle. ‘Here,’ he said (according to Churchill), ‘is the decisive point. Now is the decisive moment.’ No, replied Churchill, adamantly; the decisive moment would come when the Luftwaffe hurled itself against the British Isles. This can hardly have been encouraging to French ears, nor any more so Churchill’s promise that, if France could hold on until the
spring of 1941, Britain would send her twenty to twenty-five fresh divisions. Spears says, mildly, that he was aware of Reynaud’s ‘suppressed irritation’ at the inadequacy of this offer. Reynaud remarked pointedly: ‘No doubt history will say the Battle of France was lost through lack of aircraft.’ ‘And through lack of tanks,’ retorted Churchill.

Weygand, having made it clear all along that he would fight his one last battle, was all defeatism: ‘I am helpless, I cannot intervene for I have no reserves…
C’est la dislocation.’
He repeated what he had told the Army in his proclamation of 9 June: ‘We have come to the last quarter of an hour.’
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Weygand concluded by giving his opinion that France might soon have to ask for an armistice. According to Churchill, Reynaud snapped back: ‘That is a political question.’ Then Churchill, deeply moved by the agony of the French, erupted into a new explosion of inspired, visionary oratory, once more declaring Britain’s determination to fight to the end. Prophetically, he added:

It is possible that the Nazis may dominate Europe, but it will be a Europe in revolt, and in the end it is certain that a regime whose victories are in the main due to its machines will collapse. Machines will one day beat machines.

Then, without waiting for an answer to it, he threw in the question that was obviously uppermost in his mind: if France’s armies were to succumb, what would the French Navy do?

After the meeting ended, Churchill took aside General Georges, the French general on whom, from pre-war days, he placed the greatest reliance. He was shattered to discover that Georges was now largely in agreement with Weygand. At dinner that night, Churchill, turning in a friendly manner to Pétain, said: ‘Think back! We went through difficult times in 1918 but we got over them. We shall get over these in the same way!’ Pétain replied coldly:

In 1918, I gave you forty divisions to save the British Army. Where are the forty British divisions that we would need to save ourselves today?

The question was unanswerable. Churchill and his advisers returned to London, anticipating the worst.

The ‘Softs’ versus the ‘Hards’

Behind the scenes of the French Government, the struggle between the ‘softs’ and the ‘hards’ raged on. On one side was Reynaud, backed principally by the cold, unconquerable will of Georges Mandel, by Campinchi (Navy) and Marin (Minister of State), and now by de Gaulle, all determined to be loyal to the Anglo-French Declaration to fight to the end in France and to continue from North Africa.
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Against them were arrayed Weygand, Pétain, Baudouin, Chautemps and Ybarnegaray (the latter two Ministers of State without Portfolio) – and Hélène de Portes – all the time bringing over new recruits to their side. The case of the ‘softs’ was that it was imperative to negotiate a separate peace at once; the validity of the Anglo-French Declaration was questionable, because although (in the views of some) she had pushed France into the war, the British had not upheld their part of the bargain, by keeping back the R.A.F. in Britain and by evacuating the B.E.F.

To his song about fighting one last battle to ‘save honour’, Weygand had added a new refrain. Haunted by the precedent of the Commune (which he was almost old enough to remember), he now began expressing fears that in the wake of defeat would follow revolution. This prospect clearly seemed to afflict him more than surrender to the Germans.
¹¹
On the 12th he
warned the Cabinet to remember 1917 in Russia, when ‘soldiers formed
soviets
in the regiments and in the armies’. He urged that Army divisions be kept intact, so as to ‘maintain order’. The following day, Weygand announced that he had received a telegram via the Ministry of the Marine, stating that ‘serious disturbances have broken out in Paris, and that Thorez has installed himself in the Élysée’. President Lebrun jumped, and the rest of the Cabinet were aghast, except for Mandel, who, as Minister of the Interior, declared with crushing certainty: ‘There are no riots in Paris and M. Thorez, M. le Président, will not sleep in your bed this evening.’ But the era of the Popular Front had planted one last paving-stone on the way to France’s downfall.

For all their disagreements during the inter-war years, Pétain was now completely at one with Weygand, both in his fears about ‘internal order’ and in the need to stop the fighting. Ever since Verdun, horror of the losses suffered by ‘his’ French soldiers had left an ineradicable mark upon the eighty-four-year-old marshal. There is something infinitely pathetic about Pétain in these days. Except for when any mention of the troops and their suffering would snap him to life, there were long periods when he seemed not to be aware of what was going on. Reynaud notes in his memoirs that after Weygand had delivered his account of the fighting at the Cabinet meeting of 9 June,

Marshal Pétain said nothing. He seemed to be asleep, prostrated. I questioned him. ‘Don’t you want to express an opinion, Marshal? These gentlemen are anxious to hear you.’ ‘I’ve nothing to say,’ he replied.

Listening to ‘that thin voice and cough’ on the radio, Arthur Koestler was reminded of ‘a skeleton with a chill’, and somehow it was such images of the grave and the snows of yesteryear that most struck people on encountering Pétain in these days. Making his first call on the Marshal at his office near the Invalides, Spears was struck by the complete ‘sense of unreality’ there: ‘it was as dead, as somnolent, as the chambers of a provincial lawyer on a Sunday afternoon’. On a later visit in
June, the impending fall of Rouen made Spears remark to Pétain that what France needed was another Joan of Arc. The name promptly roused Pétain, who asked Spears whether he had ever read his speech about Joan of Arc (‘When was it, in 1937, ’38?’). Bringing down a bound volume of typescript from a bookshelf, he proceeded to read out the complete speech in a dull monotone. Spears was unable to recall a single sentence; but what he did remember

was the terrible sadness I felt as I watched him, a sadness now based on pity for a very old man for whom I had, till so recently, felt the deepest affection and regard. He was infinitely pathetic in his childish satisfaction as he read.

Even more saddening, Spears reflected, was the enormous influence Pétain wielded in France; what French man or woman in these days, he wondered, was not saying, ‘He will save us as he did at Verdun.’ The next day Spears warned Churchill that he was certain the Marshal would never leave France; there would be no question of his following any French Government into exile.

General Spears, in his illuminating, vivid account of this page of history, speaks of Reynaud staggering not only under the burden of his own responsibilities, but ‘the additional cross of the entourage with which he had handicapped himself. He was like those savage warriors who, not contented with the wounds inflicted by the enemy, gash themselves with knives.’ The source of perhaps the most crippling wounds Reynaud received from his entourage was the one which in these terrible days should have lent him the most comfort – his mistress, Hélène de Portes. The same ruthless, relentless energy she had once applied to pushing her chevalier to the top rung of the political ladder was now devoted to the cause of obtaining an early separate peace. Following the Government to Tours, then to Bordeaux, the Comtesse de Portes was everywhere, plaguing the Prime Minister incessantly, without mercy, in a manner that astounded the British officials who came in contact with her. Paul Baudouin, who was completely her man and came to represent her will within the Cabinet, wrote with the utmost
restrained chivalry: ‘if she acted as the controller of the Cabinet, her one desire was to save the country by defending and fortifying the man she admired.’ Certainly the impression one gets from those others who were present is that Reynaud was never for a moment left alone, never allowed to make a decision or an appointment without Hélène de Portes being party to it. In the middle of deliberations of the War Cabinet she would ring him on his private telephone; if, in despair, he should disconnect it, she would summon ushers to take in written messages to him, and finally she would often burst into the council chamber herself. On one occasion at Tours, Spears (who admittedly was no devotee of the Countess) was astonished to see her in the courtyard of Reynaud’s residence, clad ‘in a dressing gown over her red pyjamas, directing the traffic from the steps of the main entrance’. This was relatively harmless; but on another occasion Spears also found her intercepting one of Reynaud’s stenographers and reading over his shoulder a most important and top-secret communication from Churchill.
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Again, when a secret telegram from the French Embassy in London had been missing for some hours, Reynaud’s
chef de cabinet
from the Quai d’Orsay, Roland de Margerie, eventually produced it with the hushed whisper ‘It was in Madame de Portes’s bed.’
¹³
In Spears’s opinion, as he left France, it was Reynaud’s mistress who did him the greatest harm, because she ‘had imposed on him as collaborators the men who were now his bitterest opponents’.

The Breaking of Reynaud

Certainly, she must have greatly added to the physical and nervous strain imposed on Reynaud in these last days. By 12 June, Reynaud was beginning to break. That night he was persauded
by the ‘softs’ to telephone Churchill and ask him to fly to Tours, once again, to discuss the prospects that France would conclude a separate peace with Germany. The following afternoon Churchill arrived, accompanied by Halifax and Beaverbrook. According to Churchill, over lunch Baudouin ‘began at once in his soft, silky manner about the hopelessness of the French resistance’. Only if the United States declared war on Germany might it now be possible for France to continue. After lunch, Churchill was received at the Prefecture by Mandel, who in marked contrast to Baudouin was