Voices from the Dark Years (3 page)
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Authors: Douglas Boyd
I began this work in a spirit of scepticism not improper in a historian, yet as it progressed I was frequently humbled by the courage of ordinary French men and women who followed their consciences at a time when doing so invited torture and death for oneself, one’s friends and loved ones. Their memories are harrowing, but we owe them a hearing before those memories are lost forever.
Douglas Boyd, Gironde, France,
Summer 2014
PART 1
1
The Berliner Sportpalast was as near as one could get in 1939 to the ambiance of a twenty-first-century rock concert. Spotlights played on thousands of upraised arms giving the Hitler salute, the huge red-white-black banners and the Nazi aristocracy on the platform. The hall was packed with the uniformed Party faithful and a sprinkling of soldiers, airmen and sailors on leave. The PA system was cranked up as high as it could go. After several underlings had spoken, top-of-the-bill Adolf Hitler thumped the rostrum on the dais to wind his audience up to the usual fever pitch. The text of his sermon was fear – the fear of the Blitzkreig machine that had destroyed Poland and was about to be unleashed on the Western Allies.
Hamming it up, the Führer posed the question in so many Dutch, Belgian, French and British minds: ‘“When is he coming?” they ask.’ The audience was silent as he paused and scanned the hall, as though seeking the answer among his followers. Then, with his impeccably theatrical sense of timing, he said, ‘I tell them, don’t worry. He’s coming all right!’
‘Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!’
The chanting and roars of applause rang out over radios throughout Europe – yet another exercise in the war of nerves in the autumn and winter of 1939–40. The waiting period before the bloodshed was deprecatingly called ‘the phoney war’, but was also punningly christened the ‘bore war’ by the soldiers in Lord Gort’s BEF on the western flank of the Allied line in France because nothing much seemed to be happening on the ground. With similar humour, the men in field-grey on the other bank of the Rhine called it
der Sitzkrieg
in contrast with their Blitzkrieg conquest of Poland the previous September.
Reporting to HQ of 2nd French North African Division at Toul in Lorraine, reservist Capt Barlone found the lack of clothing, arms, ammunition and vehicles ‘disastrous and scandalous’. There was a general assumption in the officers’ mess that if it came to a shooting war, France would somehow muddle through. The twin problems, as he saw them, were that the General Staff was everywhere preparing for the static war of 1914–18 and thus had no defence in depth against fast-moving, modern mechanised columns. Even rations were inadequate: the army was supposed to live off the land by slaughtering animals belonging to the evacuated civilian population and looting their crops and fruit. When temperatures in Lorraine dropped below −36°C that winter, Barlone's men were sleeping in barns, where their horses’ bodies were the only source of warmth.
1
One astute observer of the Parisian scene as the shooting war drew nearer was American publisher Thomas Kernan, managing editor of the French edition of
Vogue.
Well-connected and welcome in all the best places, he watched the final rounds in the game of musical beds that had been a feature of French political life under the two empires and three republics which had succeeded each other since the Revolution. When in March 1940 Prime Minister Édouard Daladier – Chamberlain’s co-signatory to the disastrous Munich Agreement that had given Hitler the green light to invade Czechoslovakia in 1938 – resigned the premiership, Kernan knew that Daladier’s hand had been forced by the Comtesse de Portes, Paul Reynaud’s scheming and ambitious mistress.
Daughter of a rich merchant in Marseille, Hélène Rebuffel had married Comte Jean de Portes for the title and social standing that went with it, enabling her to set up her own
salon
in Paris
.
There, in 1929, she met Paul Reynaud, a lawyer making his way up the political ladder. Short, poorly dressed, nervous in speech and uncomfortable in manner, Reynaud was not her type – until he was made Minister of Finance the following year after predicting the Wall Street Crash well ahead of the event. His second great political success was as Minister for the Colonies, after which gossip said that Hélène de Portes intended to make Reynaud the ruler of France, so that she could rule it through him. Pre-war France, where women did not have the vote and were debarred from political office, was nevertheless a country where ambitious and intelligent women exercised considerable political power in the traditional way.
Daladier’s own mistress was the coolly attractive daughter of a rich sardine packer, who had married the Marquis of Crussol for his title – to the dismay of the aristocratic Crussol family. It was at her
salon
that Daladier fell victim to her charms. André Tardieu, founder of the Republican Centre movement was bedding Mary Marquet, a star of the Comédie Française – which is where Yvon Delbos, Foreign Minister in the Popular Front government, found his stately brunette mistress Germaine Rouer. Georges Mandel, who had been
chef de cabinet
to Clemenceau, found his blonde, buxom mistress Béatrice Bretty there too. At the time he was French delegate to the League of Nations, Paul Boncour wrote to his mistress Magda Fontanges, ‘When I think of your lovely body, I don’t give a damn about Central Europe.’ Rather embarrassingly, the letter was read out in evidence when she was on trial for shooting Comte Charles Chambrun.
2
Watching all the moves, Kernan saw the Comtesse de Portes increasingly worried as Reynaud became more and more reliant in the developing crisis on his astute friend and
chef de cabinet
Gaston Palewski. Her best hope of regaining control over him was to marry her lover. Reynaud was 52 – exactly twice her age. Father of one child and separated from his wife, he was unable to get a quick divorce under the existing law and the law could only be changed by the Minister of Justice. Paul Reynaud was that minister, but for him to upset the Church by altering the law for his own benefit was too near the knuckle, even in the Third Republic.
So the comtesse had a little
tête-à-tête
with her rival the Marquise de Crussol. After some fencing between these two powerful women, Portes proposed to Crussol that it would solve both their problems if Reynaud were moved down to his old post as Minister of Finance, where he would present less of a threat to Daladier. Georges Bonnet, a member of the pals’ club whose disastrous pro-Munich policy had cost him the Foreign Ministry, could then be made Minister of Justice – in gratitude for which Bonnet could sort out the divorce law, enabling the comtesse to marry Reynaud.
Voilà!
Bonnet’s law of 29 November 1939 reduced the waiting period for divorce from three years to one, but with Reynaud gathering support from both the left and the right the Marquise de Crussol complained to the Comtesse de Portes that she was not keeping to the deal they had agreed. When Hélène de Portes explained that the problem was Palewski’s influence over Reynaud, against which she was powerless, Palewski’s time was up because the marquise instructed her lover Daladier to pressure Reynaud into replacing him with two less savvy advisers named Lecca and Devau. Both comtesse and marquise heaved sighs of relief, but when Daladier’s hold on power slipped in March 1940, Reynaud became prime minister anyway. Enjoying their success and their rivals’ discomfiture, both he and his mistress were unaware that on the stage set for the comedy of musical beds, a
folie à deux
tragedy was about to be played, with her in the principal role.
3
Demonstrating his ability to sniff the wind of change, Palewski wrote off the lot of them and later slipped across the Channel to become a crucial figure in the Gaullist movement both during and after the war.
Not every foreigner in the French capital was interested in the political scene. In the spring of 1940, a dilettante Englishman named Dennis Freeman returned to his beloved Parisian home after wintering in Switzerland. His diary is full of more mundane things: the gardeners setting out bedding plants behind the cathedral of Notre Dame and in the courtyard of the Louvre; magnolias blooming in the Avenue Gabriel and the leaves on the chestnut trees that had never looked greener and fresher. Less overcrowded and emptier of motor traffic than in previous years, the capital exuded a peculiar air of nostalgic beauty, with smartly-dressed women on the Champs Elysées wearing colourful flowered dresses and pretty hats, as though thumbing their delicate noses at the men in field-grey lurking across the Rhine. A typical passage was:
A new and trivial comedy by Cocteau made its appearance at the [Théâtre] Bouffes.
Médée
by Milhaud, with décor by André Masson, was produced at the Opéra on the stage which a few days earlier had been filled by Maurice Chevalier and Gracie Fields. People still went to the theatres and music halls. The Parisians dined out as usual – the Germans, we were constantly told, would sooner or later starve. At least three-quarters of the night clubs had closed, but the few remaining open were full. The
guignol
puppet theatre in the Luxembourg with new [villains] Messrs Hitler and Goering, was a big draw. There were even races at Longchamps and the Entente Cordiale was weekly cemented by some inter-allied sporting event.
4
If that does not sound like a capital preparing for war, Freeman complained that, on three days a week, no meat could be bought, except for sucking lamb which was classed as fish for some reason. Coffee and sugar, when they could be found, cost far more than the previous year. With no hard liquor to be had on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday and no pastry or confectionery on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, those addicted to rum babas could enjoy them only on Sunday. Restaurants were permitted to serve only one meat dish of 100g per person, and the clients got butter only with cheese or sardines.
By the end of the cool spring of 1940 coal and wood were almost unobtainable in Paris. A law had been passed limiting the period during which central heating might be used. Only government-monopoly cigarettes were available in the
tabacs.
World-famous luxury goods stores in the main thoroughfares had shut down and many Metro stations were closed. With only a reduced service of buses, taxis were scarce and at night practically unobtainable. Several times a week Freeman heard anti-aircraft guns in action, by night and by day.
5
Five hundred kilometres to the south, spring came a little earlier than to Paris. The town of Moissac on the River Tarn, near its confluence with the mighty Garonne, was not a place where people worried much about perfume, jewellery and fancy cakes. Known throughout France as the centre of production of Chasselas dessert grapes, the town had its normal population of 8,000 already swollen by an influx of refugees from the Spanish Civil War, welcomed by its left-of-centre mayor Roger Delthil, who intoned the
Internationale
as often as the
Marseillaise
at public events. He was also senator for the
département
of Tarn-et-Garonne – in France it is still quite usual for one man to hold several public offices simultaneously. After war was declared in September 1939, Delthil reminded his fellow citizens that when disastrous floods had swept homes away and caused many deaths in 1930, the country had been generous in its financial support for reconstruction. On all the hoardings, a notice read:
We have been asked to welcome 1,500 compatriots, women, children and men above military age who have been obliged to flee the atrocities of a war that has been thrust upon us. These unfortunate people of all classes have had to leave their homes with nothing. They will arrive in Moissac completely unprovided for. The municipality will find or requisition the necessary accommodation.
I am counting on the patriotism of the people of Moissac, whose sons are doing their duty on the frontier. I am counting on them also because when misfortune struck our town in 1930 all France in an admirable groundswell of solidarity sent us many millions. We have a debt to pay. We shall pay it.
Roger Delthil, Mayor of Moissac, Senator of Tarn-et-Garonne
By 12 September 1939 municipal employees had requisitioned 1,910 blankets, 400 stoves, 400 oil lamps and all the basic necessities to see the expected flood of refugees through the winter. An eighteenth-century town house at No. 18, Quai du Vieux Port was opened as a reception centre for them. Known as ‘La Maison de Moissac’, it initially housed eleven refugees from Germany, Austria and the Saarland.
