Voices from the Dark Years (5 page)

So, by November 1918 one out of ten French citizens
of
all age-groups and both sexes
was a casualty in one way or another, without counting the hundreds of thousands made homeless by the fighting and the concomitant disruption to family life. Coming as it did after the revolutionary wars, the wars of the two empires and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, the First World War traumatised the whole nation. Long lists of names on war memorials in small villages all over France testify to the slaughter of all the adult males in many families. In the southern
départements
, telephone directories show as many Italian and Spanish surnames as French ones, thanks to the flood of landless younger sons who came from Italy and Spain between the two world wars to replace the dead youth of France by marrying local girls otherwise condemned to lifelong spinsterhood.

In addition to the demoralising scale of French casualties, there was another factor in the war-weariness of French soldiers by 1917 and 1918 that caused widespread and brutally repressed mutinies. For the British, Empire and American forces fighting on their flanks, the war was destroying a foreign land they would forget soon after returning home, whereas the
poilus
were fighting in a wasteland where formerly their farms, villages and cities had stood – but which was so torn and cratered by the bombardments that it seemed impossible for street lines to be traced with certainty, let alone homes rebuilt or fields poisoned with chemicals ever made fertile again.

It would have been surprising if, after only thirty-two years, the survivors of that carnage and their sons had wished to repeat the experience, once abandoned by their allies and having a totally justified lack of faith in their divided leaders, a disrupted command structure, virtually no working communications, outdated weapons and grossly inadequate air cover.

Paradoxically, to defend the country they loved, many foreign residents volunteered to fight for France. Accepted as combatants only in the Foreign Legion, they were formed into Régiments de Marche de Volontaires Etrangers (RMVE with numbering upwards of twenty), to distinguish them from the ‘old’ Legion, shipped over from North Africa in this hour of need. 22 RMVE listed men of forty-seven nationalities, but 25 per cent of them were Republican refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Both they and the east Europeans in these temporary regiments included a high percentage of communists, which made their officers consider them politically unreliable. Issued inadequate kit and weapons or none at all, they were held in reserve until after the invasion and then thrown into the line to sink or swim, poorly trained and ill-equipped. Yet their combat record was no worse than that of many regular regiments.
⁵

In Alsace behind the Maginot Line, eminent Parisian surgeon and army reservist Joseph Gouzi worked day and night in a well-organised mobile surgical unit, moving from one pre-planned position to the next, but things were not like that in the centre of the line. Dennis Freeman and his friend Douglas Cooper enlisted in the French army as ambulance drivers and found themselves in the headlong rout, driving badly wounded men to improvised hospitals where doctors and patients were always on the point of being re-evacuated as the enemy pressed closer. On 7 June at Oigny, Freeman noted:

The villagers could not have left so very long before, for the little gardens looked well tended and there was an air of orderliness and well-being about the place. It was difficult to reconcile the ceaseless thunder of the distant guns and the busy movement of the doctors,
infirmiers
and stretcher-bearers with the rural scene. Cottages had been transformed into dressing-stations. The simpler operations were performed in the forge.
⁶

From time to time, the two English volunteers crossed paths with compatriots. On 8 June near Troyes, Cooper noted: ‘Outside in the street I found several English soldiers [from] the Pioneer Corps, whose duty it was to follow the RAF around, making landing-grounds for them, and digging reservoirs for petrol. Now that most of the English airmen had left, they themselves were expecting to be moved any day
:

The Germans had reached Forges-les-Eaux and were pressing on towards Rouen and the Seine. They seemed to be advancing everywhere. Weygand had issued a proclamation:
Nous sommes en dernier quart d’heure
[meaning, a quarter of an hour to go, with victory in sight] but the roads were horribly congested. The stream of refugees had swollen to considerable proportions in the space of an afternoon and there were not only lines of people on foot and in cars, but in addition a large assortment of barking dogs of all sizes, goats, cattle and poultry they were taking with them. Heavy military vehicles too were on the move and when I looked closer I saw petrol tankers, radio cars and the ground staff of airfields going south. It was an alarming sight.
⁷

On 9 June Charles de Gaulle returned to his office in Paris after a meeting with Churchill in London in time to hear General Héring as military governor of the capital declare that the city would be defended street by street. The following day, Italy declared war on France and moved troops across the border, Mussolini intent on occupying as much of the country as possible before the inevitable armistice. Hearing the news in London, Churchill is said to have remarked maliciously, ‘It’s only fair. We had them on our side in the last war.’
⁸

From Paris, the government fled south-west – away from the Germans – over roads choked with refugees. General Héring, ordered not to defend the capital after all, requested to be relieved of his redundant post and given a combat command. The art treasures of the Louvre Museum and the bullion reserves of the Banque de France had gone during the phoney war – the former to various chateaux in the Loire Valley and the latter spread far and wide in North America, Martinique and French West Africa. As it had during the German invasions of 1870 and 1914, the government continued its flight from Tours towards Bordeaux, with politicians and civil servants sleeping in their official cars by the side of roads lined with abandoned horse-drawn and motor vehicles. During the brief halt in Tours, Reynaud made a desperate appeal to the United States for air support, which fell on deaf ears.

On the night of 13 June the Parisian suburban hospital at Orsay was staffed by seven desperate nurses caring for eighty sick and elderly patients, plus refugee casualties. With no proper meal for days and only a few hours’ sleep, they asked a passing army major what to do about the patients who could not be moved when the time came to evacuate the others. ‘Give them a last injection,’ he replied. ‘Morphine or strychnine is best.’ Too exhausted to think any further, four of the nurses prepared the fatal doses and administered them, rather than leave seven aged patients behind. The intended act of mercy cost them between one and five years’ imprisonment when they were sentenced in May 1942.

North of Paris, Freeman and Cooper in their ambulances were stopped in Sens by a general trying to rally some troops, who asked whether they had any maps he could borrow. A general without a map! It was unreal – as was their experience of driving into Sens with a naked, screaming, delirious wounded man being tended by a wounded African soldier, to find:

the café at the big crossroads full of people leisurely sipping their aperitif. Busy housewives laden with their baskets were completing their weekend shopping and in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Paris opposite the cathedral the tables with their chequered cloths and gay umbrellas were already laid for the evening meal.

The vast courtyard [of the hospital] presented an extraordinary spectacle. Hundreds of ambulances, parked without any attempt at order, were being loaded and unloaded at the greatest possible speed. Nurses, doctors, medics and stretcher-bearers … looked tired and bewildered by the unmanageable influx of new cases that had suddenly been flung upon them. Some drivers who had been waiting to unload for some time [and] had just been told that they were to go on to Auxerre, sixty kilometres distant.
⁹

The German advance was so rapid that, no sooner had a hospital been set up than it had to be evacuated. Ordered back to Sens, Freeman and Cooper drove through the night without lights against the press of military and civilian traffic fighting its way southwards. The two Britons found what had been a calm provincial town the previous evening transformed:

Every available inch of space was occupied by some kind of vehicle … being loaded ready to leave. The food shops were besieged; everyone was scrambling to purchase as much as possible. One sensed a feeling among the people that they might not see food again for many days. There were no newspapers to calm their fears, no garages to attend to repairs, no petrol to help them on their way, and no police to control them. Desperate, they seemed unable to decide whether to fight for the food they needed now, or take a risk and escape before the arrival of the Germans. In the space of one hour, Sens had become a
ville en panique
.
¹⁰

It was not the only one. While the driver of a van taking all the municipal records of the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt was desperately searching for petrol, two deserting soldiers hijacked the vehicle and disappeared with the registers of births, marriages and deaths.

Heading back the way they had come, Freeman and Cooper passed columns of African and Vietnamese troops, the latter carrying their kit on sticks over their shoulders. Unable to find a refuelling dump, the two Britons took the risk of filling up their petrol tank from a pump at a service station that was already blazing from a bomb. From time to time they met up with comrades from the same unit and a group of English women volunteers driving ambulances financed by a large American acting as their commandant.

On 14 June at 5.30 a.m. the first German units drove through the Porte de la Villette and into the heart of Paris beneath clouds of black smoke from fuel dumps set on fire by the retreating French army. The previous afternoon two French officers with a trumpeter had met the Germans at Sarcelles and confirmed that the city would not be defended. With most of the capital’s food supplies coming from the north, where the disruption to road and rail traffic was total, 700,000 Parisians who had not fled watched the enemy from behind closed shutters and drawn curtains, venturing out only when the sparkling clean mobile kitchens of the German Winterhilfe organisation began dispensing hot soup and bread for the asking. It would be well into the autumn before all the other 2.1 million residents returned, less the more prudent Jewish ones.

Inhabitants of Orléans who had defied orders to flee found it impossible to replace lost documents after the municipal records and Joan of Arc’s house went up in smoke during German air raids on 14 and 15 June. The telephone system was destroyed. Had it been working, there was no one in local government offices to deal with the problems of 3,000 families whose homes had been destroyed. The various departments were dispersed in Nontron, Tulle, Guéret, Millau, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Tonneins and Marmande – and would stay there until 17 July.

With water and gas mains ruptured, fires smouldered everywhere for the next two weeks, causing more destruction. Streets were blocked by collapsed buildings. There was no electricity and no food. The French army had blown up the Joffre and Georges V road bridges – which did not prevent the incoming Wehrmacht from using the intact Vierzon railway bridge to cross the River Loire, but the disruption for normal traffic was so great that clearing up by French prisoners of war and unemployed Parisians was to last eight months. In nearby Neuville-aux-Bois the only medical care for refugees streaming in was provided by the wives of generals Ecot, Berre and Velle, whose ambulance had run out of petrol there, Madame Ecot literally taking a hat round each morning to beg money for food.

That month, a record 1,212 million francs were withdrawn before the savings banks put up their shutters. The Finance Ministry, finding itself stuck at Avoine near Saumur with the Germans approaching, paid a street-cleaner to burn banknotes to the value of 25 million francs. The prefect of the Nord
d
é
partement
having demanded several million francs for the immediate needs of his population cut off from the rest of France by the German advance, the government loaded the money aboard two Glenn-Martin aircraft that were shot down as unidentified by a British ack-ack battery near Lille. Of the six crewmen, only one managed to parachute to safety through the clouds of whirling banknotes. Millions were lost, the Prefect eventually signing a receipt for only 240,000 francs.
¹¹

South of Orléans, the remaining inhabitants of Poitiers dismantled the makeshift barricades erected by men of 274th Infantry Regiment and sent the mayor out with a white flag to inform the approaching Germans that the town would not be defended. A few miles away at Le Blanc, veterans from the First World War beat up sappers trying to destroy the bridge over the River Creuse and stamped out the sputtering fuses before the charges blew. At St-Benoît-sur-Loire, 54-year-old surrealist poet Max Jacob refused to flee because St-Benoît had neither bridges nor factories meriting German bombardment. The decision to stay put was to cost this long-term friend of Picasso his life.