Berlin Diary (71 page)

One of the soldiers from South Germany later whispers to me: “Yeah, it was the Prussians who destroyed the town.” He, a common German soldier, is disgusted with the destruction. “Always the poor people who get it,” he says.

The local commandant, a German businessman called up from the reserve, receives us in one of the few houses in town still standing. A few facts from him: Ten thousand out of twenty-four thousand residents of Maubeuge either have returned or rode out the bombing and bombardment. The German army, and, since a few days, German relief workers, help to keep them from starving. They bring bread from Germany. But yesterday, the old boy says, he uncovered some wheat and is getting it ground into flour. “One business,” he says, “apparently didn’t close up shop at any time, during the battle or since. The local
bordel
. I finally closed it, but the Madame came in to see me and was very put out. ‘Business as usual, why not?’ she said.” Yesterday, he reveals, the High Command ordered the opening of all houses of prostitution in the part of France occupied by German troops. “I must send for the Madame. She will be pleased to hear it,” he chuckles.

We consume several bottles of pretty fair
vin rouge
and nibble biscuits, and the commandant talks on enthusiastically about his problem. Obviously he enjoys his job, and he is certainly not the old sadistic Prussian
master of the story-books. On the whole, a very human fellow. Homesick, I gather. Hoping the war won’t last much longer. Somehow it’s worse, he thinks, than what he went through the four years of the World War in this very district. But perhaps that is because it’s so recent, and the old memories blurred. Anyway, he talks of his dog and his wife and family.

We finally take our leave. An orderly shows us our quarters, in an abandoned house with atrocious pseudo-Oriental furnishings, which, we soon establish from the wall-hangings and papers lying around, was occupied by one of the leading local bankers. French bourgeois taste at its very lowest. I take to myself one of the family bedrooms. The mattress is still on the old-fashioned double bed. The banker’s clothes hang neatly in the
armoire
. Even the long-tailed black coat—you can see him, fat and important, strolling through the streets to church on Sundays in it—is there. Obviously he has left in a great hurry. No time to pack his wardrobe. Downstairs we noticed the breakfast dishes on the dining-room table. A meal never finished.

What a break in his comfortable bourgeois life this must have been, this hasty flight before the town was blown up! Here in this house—until last month—solidity, a certain comfort, respectability; the odds and ends collected for a house during a lifetime. This house one’s life, such as it is. Then boom! The Stukas. The shells. And that life, like the houses all around, blown to bits; the solidity, the respectability, the hopes, gone in a jiffy. And you and your wife and maybe your children along the roads now, hungry, craving for a drink of water—like an animal, or at best—and who would have dreamed it a month ago!—like a caveman.

Three soldiers take us for a stroll through the debris of the town as dusk falls. Just inside the town gates
a frowsy-looking woman is digging in a pile of bricks. The soldiers shout for her to beat it. It is after the curfew hour. She continues digging. One of the men, grasping his rifle, steps over to chase her away. We hear her shout: “
Coucher
?” She asks him to go to bed with her. By God, all is not destroyed here. The soldier laughs and sort of pushes her on her way. Apparently she is living in a cellar near by—like a rat. We continue through the town and pretty soon we see her over the shambles of what was once an alley. She shouts: “
Coucher
?” and then runs. We walk through the town, pausing before what is left of the church. It is hard to grasp that under those charred bricks and rubble five hundred women and children lie buried. There is so much debris that their grave has been perfectly sealed. There is not a whiff of the familiar, nauseating, sweet smell.

Back to our banker’s house as darkness comes. Outside, the army trucks roll by all night long. Once during the night I hear some anti-aircraft going into action down the road. Up at dawn, feeling not too bad, and off towards Paris
.

P
ARIS
,
June
17

It was no fun for me. When we drove into Paris, down the familiar streets, I had an ache in the pit of my stomach and I wished I had not come. My German companions were in high spirits at the sight of the city.

We came in about noon, and it was one of those lovely June days which Paris always has in this month and which, if there had been peace, would have been spent by the people going to the races at Longchamp or the tennis at Roland Garros, or idling along the boulevards
under the trees, or on the cool terraces of a café.

First shock: the streets are utterly deserted, the stores closed, the shutters down tight over all the windows. It was the emptiness that got you. Coming from Le Bourget (remembering, sentimentally, that night I raced afoot all the way into town from there to write the story of Lindbergh’s landing), we drove down the rue Lafayette. German army cars and motorcycles speeding, screaming down the street. But on the sidewalks not a human being. The various corner cafés along the street which I knew so well. They had taken in the tables and drawn the shutters. And had fled—the
patrons
, the
garçons
, the customers. Our two cars roared down the rue Lafayette, honking at every street we crossed, until I asked our driver to desist.

There, on the corner, the
Petit Journal
building in which I had worked for the Chicago
Tribune
when I first came to Paris in 1925. Across from it, the Trois Portes café—how many pleasant hours idled there when Paris, to me, was beautiful and gorgeous; and my home!

We turned left down the rue Pelletier to the Grand Boulevard. I noticed the Petit Riehe was closed. The boulevard too was deserted except for a few German soldiers, staring into the windows of the few shops that did not have their shutters down. The Place de I’Opéra now. For the first time in my life, no traffic tie-up here, no French cops shouting meaninglessly at cars hopelessly blocked. The façade of the Opera House was hidden behind stacked sandbags. The Café de la Paix seemed to be just reopening. A lone
garçon
was bringing out some tables and chairs. German soldiers stood on the terrace grabbing them. Then we turned at the Madeleine, its façade also covered with sandbags, and raced down the rue Royale. Larue’s and Weber’s, I
noted, were closed. Now before us, the familiar view. The Place de la Concorde, the Seine, the Chambre des Députés, over which a giant Swastika flag flies, and in the distance the golden dome of the Invalides. Past the Ministry of the Marine, guarded by a big German tank, into the Concorde. We drew up in front of the Hôtel Crillon, now German Headquarters. Our officer went in to inquire about quarters. I, to the displeasure of the German officials with us, stepped over to pay a call at the American Embassy next door. Bullitt, Murphy—everyone I knew—were out to lunch. I left a note for Bullitt.

We got rooms in the Scribe, where I had often stayed in the civilized days. To my surprise and pleasure, Demaree Bess and Walter Kerr, who had stayed on in Paris after almost all of their colleagues had left, were in the lobby. They came up to my room and we had a talk. Walter seemed more nervous than ever, but just as likable. Demaree was his old stolid self. He and Dorothy had been in the Elysées Park Hotel on the Rond-Point. The day before the city fell, the
patron
of the hotel had come panting to them and begged them to flee too; at any rate, he was scooting and closing the hotel. They persuaded him to turn the hotel over to them! …I inquired about my friends. Most of them had left Paris.

Demaree says the panic in Paris was indescribable. Everyone lost his head. The government gave no lead. People were told to scoot, and at least three million out of the five million in the city ran, ran without baggage, literally ran on their feet towards the south. It seems the Parisians actually believed the Germans would rape the women and do worse to the men. They had heard fantastic tales of what happened when the Germans occupied a city. The ones who stayed are all the more
amazed at the very correct behaviour of the troops—so far.

The inhabitants are bitter at their government, which in the last days, from all I hear, completely collapsed. It even forgot to tell the people until too late that Paris would not be defended. The French police and fire departments remained. A curious sight to see the
agents
, minus their pistols, directing traffic, which consists exclusively of German army vehicles, or patrolling the streets. I have a feeling that what we’re seeing here in Paris is the complete breakdown of French society—a collapse of the army, of government, of the morale of the people. It is almost too tremendous to believe.

P
ARIS
,
June
18

Marshal Pétain has asked for an armistice! The Parisians, already dazed by all that has happened, can scarcely believe it. Nor can the rest of us. That the French army must give up is clear. But most of us expected it to surrender, as did the Dutch and Belgian armies, with the government going, as Reynaud had boasted it would, to Africa, where France
, with its navy and African armies, can hold out for a long time.

The inhabitants got the news of Pétain’s action by loud-speaker, conveniently provided by the Germans in nearly every square in town. I stood in a throng of French men and women on the Place de la Concorde when the news first came. They were almost struck dead. Before the Hôtel Crillon—where Woodrow Wilson stayed during the Peace Conference when the terms for Germany were being drawn up—cars raced up and unloaded gold-braided officers. There was much peering through monocles, heel-clicking, saluting. In the Place there, that square without equal in Europe,
where you can see from one spot the Madeleine, the Louvre, Notre-Dame in the distance down the Seine, the Chamber of Deputies, the golden dome of the Invalides, where Napoleon is buried, then the Eiffel Tower, on which floats today a huge Swastika, and finally, up the Champs-Elysées, the Arc de Triomphe—the people in the Place de la Concorde did not notice the bustle in front of German Headquarters at the Crillon. They stared at the ground, then at each other. They said: “Pétain surrendering! What does it mean?
Comment? Pourquoi?
” And no one appeared to have the heart for an answer.

This evening Paris is weird and, to me, unrecognizable. There’s a curfew at nine p.m.—an hour before dark. The black-out is still enforced. The streets tonight are dark and deserted. The Paris of gay lights, the laughter, the music, the women in the streets—when was that? And what is this?

I noticed today some open fraternizing between German troops and the inhabitants. Most of the soldiers seem to be Austrian, are well mannered; and quite a few speak French. Most of the German troops act like naïve tourists, and this has proved a pleasant surprise to the Parisians. It seems funny, but every German soldier carries a camera. I saw them by the thousands today, photographing Notre-Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, the Invalides. Thousands of German soldiers congregate all day long at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where the flame still burns under the Arc. They bare their blond heads and stand there gazing.

Two newspapers appeared yesterday in Paris,
La Victoire
(as life’s irony would have it) and
Le Matin
. I saw Bueno-Varilla, publisher of the
Matin
, at the Embassy yesterday. I’m told he’s anxious to please the
Germans and see that his paper gets off to a favourable start. It has already begun to attack England, to blame England for France’s predicament!
La Victoire
, run by a crank, urges Parisians no longer to refer to the Germans as “
Boches
.” Its editorial yesterday ended: “
Vive Paris! Vive la France!
”

The German army moved into Bess’s hotel yesterday, but they valiantly held on to their floor.