To Lose a Battle (84 page)

The onslaught on the railway stations. The disappearance of the buses and taxis from the streets. The melting away of the town, as if infected with consumption. The tommy-guns of the ‘flics’ at the street corners. The peculiar glance of the people in the Underground, with the dim candles of fear lit behind their eyeballs. The parachutist scare. The Fifth Column psychosis.

Then he was rearrested, along with the leading German anti-Nazis who had sought refuge in France, some of whom now began to take cyanide.

General Spears phrased his first reports to Churchill on much the same lines. Churchill, he said,

had been misinformed when told Paris was getting angry. The city was fast emptying of the well-to-do… the populace was merely bewildered and apathetic. There was absolutely no sign of the effervescence and excitement that had vibrated through the city in the early days of 1914.

At the same time, from deep within the Maginot Line, Lieutenant Claude Jamet was sadly reflecting:

In whom – officer or soldier – have I discovered a true sacred fire, a sincere ardour, the dedication of one’s whole being towards one solitary goal? The sole and complete will to ‘make war’ – and to win it? Oh yes, we should be vexed to be beaten… But how can one get worked up about something that one simply cannot imagine?

On Sunday 26 May, there had been a repetition in Paris of the solemn religious invocations of the previous week. The relics of Ste Geneviève had been displayed in front of the Panthéon, the resting place of the great men of France’s past; but for Senator Bardoux, who was again present, the spectacle there of the ‘stricken and silent crowd, which has lost its voice so that it can longer even sing the
Marseillaise
and recites the litanies mechanically, is incapable of comforting me. The shadow of 1870 is spreading over the country.’

Belgium Capitulates

As the news got around that the B.E.F. was beginning to embark
from Dunkirk, French despair was accompanied by an emotional rift, now rapidly widening, between the Allies. Spears, ever sensitive to the prevailing atmosphere after a lifetime of experience in French affairs, says that on his arrival

for the first time I sensed a break in the relationships between the two nations, no more perceptible than a crack in crystal, but going right through, irreparably. We were no longer one.

The implications of the widening breach were equally horrifying to neutral observers. ‘I watched with fear the hatred of the French for the English growing by giant leaps and bounds,’ wrote Clare Boothe. ‘Many people now quite openly blamed the whole horrible fiasco on the British High Command.’

On 28 May, France learned of another cause of rancour. In the small hours of that morning, Belgium had surrendered. Contrary to views widespread among her allies at the time, the Belgian Army (which, designed exclusively for defence, had neither tanks nor planes, and which had been bombed incessantly), had fought gallantly, outnumbered and outmatched, for eighteen days, while its troops watched most of their homes and countryside overrun. On the 25th, King Leopold had issued a resounding exhortation to his soldiers to continue to resist, and they had responded with vigour and courage, but had been driven out of their positions around Ypres by the Luftwaffe’s overwhelming air superiority. The gap they left could have rent a great hole in Gort’s Dunkirk perimeter defences; but it so happened that that day British Intelligence secured one of the few coups of the campaign to date. Highly secret documents captured from a liaison officer to von Bock, C.-in-C. of Army Group ‘B’, revealed that the Germans were planning to attack with two corps into the Ypres gap. Gort immediately, and entirely off his own bat, threw in to plug the hole two divisions, the 5th and 50th, which had previously been earmarked for joining in Weygand’s offensive. It was to be regarded, by the British official historian, as ‘perhaps his most fateful action during the whole campaign’, but it was also to provide one more source of cries of
perfide albion!
Yet, without it, Dunkirk could not have been held – and who, in the light of history, can say that Gort was wrong?

The surrender of the Belgian Army on its left did, however, furnish the final blow to Prioux’s First Army in the Lille pocket (it also left a gaping hole between the B.E.F. and the sea); but from the hints dropped by King Leopold and General Michiels for the past several days, it should have been abundantly clear to the French High Command that it was only a matter of hours before Belgium succumbed. Nevertheless, in the despair of the moment, Reynaud reacted with ferocity. Broadcasting to the nation that night, he declared that Leopold had laid down his arms ‘without warning General Blanchard, without a thought or a word for the French or British troops who went to the aid of his country in response to his agonized appeal’. He rated it ‘a deed without precedent in history’.
⁷
Anger towards the defaulting ally swept through France. Listening to Reynaud’s broadcast in a bistro, Gordon Waterfield observed two women burst into tears, crying
‘Les salauds, les salauds!’
Parisians threw Belgian refugees out of their houses, countrymen set fire to their wretched carts, French refugees heckled and buffeted them in stations and on the roads.

Weygand and the ‘Separate Peace’ Lobby

Within Paul Reynaud’s Government, the twin viruses of defeatism and anti-British sentiment had established themselves even before they had begun to cast their malaise in wider circles. 24 and 25 May were critical days, and they marked a kind of watershed. Henceforth, Weygand, the ‘political general’, is to be found exerting an influence over French councils far transcending his military functions as Generalissimo; it was he, not Pétain, who first assumed lead of the ‘separate peace’ lobby. At 1030 on the 24th, Weygand arrived for a meeting in the Prime Minister’s office at which Baudouin and Pétain were also present. According to Baudouin, who reveals himself increasingly in support of Weygand, the new C.-in-C. whispered to him on entering: ‘The situation is very serious, for the English are falling back on the ports instead of attacking to the south.’ Weygand claimed that he was not surprised by the British manoeuvre, for on the previous evening General Ironside’s tone over the telephone had made an unfavourable impression upon him. ‘I would willingly have boxed his ears,’ he exclaimed to Baudouin. In the course of his conference with Reynaud, Weygand still appeared to be adhering to his original plan, despite the British withdrawal from Arras. Then, at 1800 hours that evening, Weygand telephoned Baudouin from Vincennes, where he was with General Georges, and asked him to come and see him.

On Baudouin’s arrival, Weygand confided that the situation caused by the British withdrawal now seemed much graver than it had in the morning, and as a result he saw himself forced to abandon his plan of two days previously. Weygand, says Baudouin, ‘seemed to me overcome by the defection of the English’. He had summoned Baudouin because he wanted him to explain this to Reynaud and also to point out to him the condition in which the French Army would find itself if the forces in the north capitulated. It would then consist of only some fifty divisions, of which eighteen were immobile fortress units, and it would have to hold a front from the Somme to the Maginot Line nearly 350 miles long. Weygand described this
remaining force as a ‘wall of sand’ which would soon be pierced by the enemy. He then outlined to Baudouin his plans for the future:

the French Army ought to resist desperately on the Somme and Aisne positions. Then, when the enemy has broken this resistance, what is left of the French Army should continue to fight where it stands until it is annihilated,
to save the honour of the French flag.
⁸

Weygand repeated to Baudouin what he had told Reynaud that morning, namely, that it had been ‘criminal’ for France, the previous September, to have declared war without any of the means for carrying it on. Baudouin then expressed his doubts as to whether the Army’s morale was up to waging any new desperate struggle on the Somme and the Aisne:

Would it be possible to apply the measures envisaged by the General to save the national honour?

I said to him, ‘We have only one object – to get France out of the ordeal which she is undergoing so as to allow her, even if defeated in the field, to rise again’… With tears in his eyes, the General told me that he shared my fears.

After this meaningful exchange, the two men parted in wide agreement with each other. The fateful word ‘armistice’ had never once been mentioned, but, as Reynaud points out, this was clearly what was in both their minds, behind the talk about ‘saving national honour’.
⁹
Weygand had now been in command for just four days.

At noon on the following day, 25 May, discussions were held in Reynaud’s office lasting two and a half hours. Before they began, Churchill’s emissary, General Spears, had arrived to present his credentials to Reynaud, whom he had known well in the past. Reynaud says Spears, launched in with some acid comments on ‘how British generals always made for harbours’. Spears begged him ‘to set his face against recriminations’, saying
that the only hope for France and Britain now was to ‘act together as brothers’:

Reynaud nodded his head in approval. He got up once or twice, his small figure very erect, the shoulders of his black jacket thrown back, and walked up and down, his hands behind his back. Several times he stretched his neck and turned his head to one side as if putting on too high and too tight a collar. His Chinese eyes, always ready to emphasize his wit with a twinkle, did not smile… He looked not in the least rattled. I said to myself as I had often done before: ‘This is a likeable, gallant little man.’

To Spears and to members of the French Government with whom he spoke that day, Reynaud declared – as he was to declare repeatedly in the ensuing weeks – that he would fight, tooth and nail, to the end. Reynaud then invited Spears to attend the session of the War Cabinet which was about to take place.

Inside Reynaud’s office, Spears found Marshal Pétain, General Weygand, Admiral Darlan and Paul Baudouin waiting. Weygand had with him a liaison officer from Blanchard’s H.Q., a Major Fauvelle, whom he requested should be heard. Says Spears:

The idea of defeat, or even the shadow of such an idea, never crossed my mind, but, as Commandant Fauvelle told his story in fragments, revealing an appalling state of affairs, and as I realized that his catastrophic defeatism seemed to some extent at least to be accepted as the reflection of the real position, I felt cold fingers turning my heart to stone… In my view nothing short of throwing Fauvelle out of the window would have been adequate.

Fauvelle ended his pessimistic report on Blanchard’s situation by declaring ‘I believe in a very early capitulation’, which provoked a censure for exceeding his brief simultaneously from both Reynaud and Weygand. The discussions continued with Weygand expressing utmost gloom over the prospects of the French Army ‘retreating in good order and defending successive positions’ in the face of a new German attack. According to Spears, Weygand then turned on Reynaud, and ‘with a voice
like a saw’ said: ‘This war is sheer madness, we have gone to war with a 1918 army against a German Army of 1939. It is sheer madness.’

During this and other conferences of such extreme gravity, Spears was shocked to note the number of interruptions on the French Prime Minister’s ‘harmonium-like telephone’. If it was not his mistress, Hèléne de Portes, the caller appeared to be some Parliamentarian requesting ‘that his son-in-law serving in the north should be transferred to a part of the front where there were fewer Germans’. Spears found this revelation that the ‘Republic of Pals’ still prevailed in France horrifying:

The Chairman of a reputable board in the City of London would never allow himself to be interrupted at a meeting where he was discussing the retail price of soap with his colleagues, to deal with a personal question. But here we were, when the fate of France was in the balance, interfered with in this way.

At the same time, Spears admits that his admiration for Reynaud’s courage grew, when, following this first meeting, ‘I gradually came to appreciate what he was up against, the defeatism in high places and the trance into which France had fallen.’

After Spears departed, a second, still more important meeting
¹⁰
of the French War Cabinet was held at the Élysée that evening, at which President Lebrun was also present. Weygand opened with a brief and gloomy résumé of the disastrous course of military operations since 10 May. He claimed still to be adhering to his ‘plan’ for the north-south operation towards Bapaume (despite what he had confided to Baudouin the previous day), now due to begin on the night of the 26th–27th, but he was hardly optimistic any longer and he regarded it as ‘my duty to prepare for the worst’. At this point, Reynaud interrupted to announce receipt of a telegram from Churchill that afternoon, which now confirmed the retreat of the British from Arras, and recognized that the northern forces were to all
intents and purposes surrounded and their communications cut – save for Ostend and Dunkirk. Weygand continued with his report, forecasting the course of events that would follow the loss of the northern armies. France would find herself ‘called upon to fight against odds of three to one’. She must fight a last-ditch stand on the Somme-Aisne position; here ‘each section of the Army must fight to the last to save the honour of the country’. Weygand concluded by repeating yet again his reproaches about France’s unpreparedness to declare war.
¹¹
‘It is probable,’ he prophesied (according to Reynaud), ‘that she will pay dearly for this imprudence.’ It was time to think of the resurrection of the country.