To Lose a Battle (92 page)

Unlike Gamelin and Weygand, General Georges left no memoirs. Before vanishing finally into oblivion, he reappeared briefly and contentiously in the intrigue-ridden world of Algiers in 1943; the Allies, having imported him from France, soon came to regard him (in the words of Anthony Eden) as ‘a reactionary old defeatist’ and pensioned him off. The unhappy General Corap also made no attempt to justify himself against the charges made publicly by Reynaud, which led him to a nervous breakdown. He was later cleared at the Riom Trials, and died, in silence, at his home in Fontainbleau in 1953. Huntziger, commander on the fatal field of Sedan and leader of the armistice delegation, also had no opportunity to write his side of the battle; he was killed in a plane crash in 1941. Among the French generals taken prisoners-of-war, General Giraud managed to escape
⁹
from Königstein Castle, where he was interned with General Prioux. He too made his way to Algiers and, with American backing, established himself briefly as a rival claimant to de Gaulle for the leadership of the Free French. General Frère died of maltreatment in a German concentration camp.

Of the British participants, Lord Gort, although he had succeeded in saving so many of his men, was shattered by what had happened to the B.E.F. Not favoured by Churchill, he received no further fighting command, whereas his juniors in the B.E.F.
– Brooke, Alexander and Montgomery – rose to the highest summits of fame. Probably Churchill was right; Gort was not the man to lead or organize a modern, mechanized Army. But no one deserved greater recognition for the incalculable services he had rendered Great Britain, and the Allied cause. Wars, however, ‘are not won by evacuations’. Later, Gort was made Governor-General of Malta at a time when the island’s position seemed hopeless; here, once again, was a challenge for which his tenacious courage was supremely adapted. His career ended as High Commissioner in Palestine at the end of the war; but soon after his appointment his health broke down and he died in 1946, aged sixty.

Reynaud and Pétain

Of all the major figures of this epoch, none seem so closely shrouded in tragedy as the two French Premiers, Reynaud and his successor Pétain. A few days after the armistice, there had been a scandal when two emissaries were caught trying to smuggle out to America gold and jewellery belonging to the Comtesse de Portes – apparently unbeknown to Reynaud. On 28 June, Reynaud was driving in the south of France with the woman for whom he had worked so hard, and whose love was now about all that was left to him. To distract him from his misery, she persuaded him to take the wheel. Almost immediately the car swung off the road, into one of the plane trees lining it. A heavy suitcase hurtled forward from the back of the car to strike Hélène de Portes in the neck. She was killed instantly. Reynaud suffered only minor injuries. When he regained consciousness in hospital and was told of her death, he is said to have remarked simply: ‘
Elle était la France.
’ The remaining war years Reynaud spent in German prisons, narrowly escaping the fate of his fellow inmate, Georges Mandel. After the war he re-entered politics, devoting himself to the cause of European unity, and once more became a Minister. His first wife having died, he remarried in 1949 (aged seventy-one) and begot three children, the youngest born when he was approaching eighty. Still exercising regularly in the private
gymnasium he had constructed in his Paris apartment, Reynaud lived to be eighty-seven. He died in 1966.

Alas for him, Pétain lived to be even older, the receptacle of France’s dishonour, abandoned by his colleagues of the generation which should have been in control of the destiny of France, and later condemned by them for allowing members of the defeated nation to be marched to the Nazi slave-labour camps. As Paul Baudouin deserted him, the old Marshal said with tears in his eyes: ‘Pity me. You are going, but I, at eighty-four, must stay and lead this sort of life.’ Finally, aged ninety-five, he too died in an austere French prison in 1951. By one of the strange quirks of fortune, seven years later at the age of sixty-eight, Pétain’s erstwhile protégé and the man who had gone to continue the fight from England while Pétain capitulated, General de Gaulle, would be summoned back from old age, just like Pétain, to take over the reins of France after younger men had abdicated.

Scars of Battle

In a way, the physcial scars left buy these cataclysmic six weeks of 1940 seem not to have lingered on as did those of Verdun. The court at Vincennes which housed Gamelin’s
Thébaïde
, though destroyed by the Germans, has been rebuilt; the villages and towns of France seared by the Luftwaffe (and again by the liberating British and Americans) have long since been rebuilt. At Dinant on the Meuse and Bouillon on the Semois, German and French tourists come by the bus-load each summer to visit the pseudo-medieval Citadel and crusader Godefroy de Bouillon’s Keep, perhaps pausing midway to admire the fantastic panorama from Monthermé’s Roche-à-Sept-Heures. But there is little enough to suggest the events of fifty summers ago. Noirefontaine, whence Guderian planned his crossing of the Meuse, became a resting-place recommended by the idyllic
Route de Bonheur.
At Sedan itself, the battlefield where France’s Third Republic was first engendered and subsequently killed, it
is easier to find reminders of the battle of 1870 than of 1940. There are calvaries celebrating the gallant charge of General Margueritte’s
cuirassiers
and the Maison des Dernières Cartouches at Bazeilles, and there are war memorials and cemeteries dating from 1914–18. But 1940 has left none of the pockmarked, lunar shell-fields and the ghost-ridden atmosphere that one feels will characterize Verdun for all time. Down on the Meuse at Sedan, where the heaviest fighting took place, a few concrete bunkers (now used as cow-stalls by local farmers) still bear the marks of blows delivered by the German flak and tank guns seeking out their embrasures. But all too many of them reveal little sign of damage – a mute testimony to the fact that Grandsard’s ‘B’ reservists did not stand fast like the men of Verdun. In any case the battle did not rest here long enough for the scars to be lasting. At Houx, the weir over which Rommel’s motor-cyclists crept is still there; the island is itself a camping ground, frequented by young Germans whose parents were possibly not born in 1940. It is not easy to discover locals who can recount precisely what happened on the Meuse during those glorious May days.

As the revolutionary nightmare of Paris in May 1968 subsequently revealed, the wounds of political self-division – the heritage of the Commune and the Popular Front, with the schisms of Pétainist-versus-Gaullist now superimposed – lingered long unhealed in France. But where perhaps the invisible scars lie deepest are in the relations between the former allies, Britain and France. After 1945, disillusion and mistrust at the French performance in 1940 played their part in Britain’s determination never again to rely upon other peoples’ forces for her own security. She would loyally contribute to the collective security of NATO, but at the same time she would build her own costly Maginot Line of atomic weaponry and call it the ‘independent deterrent’. (Fortunately, unlike France’s, Britain’s ‘Maginot Line’ has been allowed to lapse into graceful obsolescence without ever being put to the test.) Meanwhile, in the irony of history, it was the Germans who pushed Britain out of the continent of Europe in June 1940; but, within the Common Market framework of the 1960s, it was France who – in 1963 –
prevailed upon the Germans not to let Britain back in again.
¹⁰
Yet this was no accident of fate, nor just the resentment of the once humiliated towards the superciliousness of the unvanquished. In France, the consequences of Dunkirk do not cease to engender suspicion even fifty years on – that, if the going ever gets too tough in Europe, whether in military or economic terms, Britain will always be tempted to pull out, as she did in 1940. Will it ever be said that, in saving the B.E.F. and thus winning the war, Britain perhaps lost the peace for herself?

Though it still remains vivid and fresh in the memories of many older people, historically that May of 1940 now seems to have belonged so much more closely to 1918, to the world of Foch and the Kaiser than the one we live in today. In some respects the figures involved in the great drama of
Sichelschnitt
are seen to march back and forth across a screen almost as dimly distant as that of the Crimea. The weapons they used have become as outdated as the national causes they represented. How many centuries ago can it have been that Vietnamese fought and died for France at Monthermé, Algerian
Tirailleurs
at Philippeville, Senegalese at Amiens? How much has changed within these five decades! The French and British Empires have ceased to exist. The German Reich was split into a Soviet satellite and a Western democracy. Both emerging from the Second World War as defeated nations, France and Germany at last discovered a common denominator; in consequence, relations between them have become more harmonious over a longer period than at any time since Louis XIV came to the throne. The Army of a reconditioned but truncated Germany came to provide France (and Britain) with her ‘best sword’ in Europe. In face of a docile and divided Germany, France herself became – at least in appearance, and for the time being – the continent’s most powerful political force west of the Elbe. (And who, at any time during the past fifty years, could have envisaged Frenchmen
fearful of a German Army, not because it was strong, but because it might not be
strong enough?
History plays strange tricks…) But all this is irrelevant. In the modern world, the combined influence of the three chief belligerents of 1940 still adds up to little when weighed against the might of the two super-powers which maintained their neutrality, through military impotence, during the Battle of France.

Back and forth through Dinant and Sedan the prosperous, well-fed burghers of the Common Market flock in their Citroëns and their Mercedes, apparently oblivious to all the misery perpetrated in this tiny blood-sodden corner of France during the past hundred and twenty years. Watching them it is sometimes hard not to wonder: did the First Sedan, the Battle of Verdun, the Second Battle of Sedan
have
to be fought before Germany and France would lower the frontier barriers between their two countries? Perhaps Hitler’s blood-curdling prediction in
Mein Kampf
that Germany would have to fight ‘one last decisive battle’ against France has come true in a sense that he indeed could never have foreseen. Certainly this Franco-German battle
must
have been the ‘last’; even with the prospects ahead of a reunited, powerful Germany, the facts of life today are such that one cannot possibly conceive of there being any repeat. At last
finis
seems to have been written to the saga wherein the ancient rivalry between France and Germany set the tempo of world affairs. But at what a cost!

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Part One: Books

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