Voices from the Dark Years (6 page)

In Paris, apart from an ordinance prohibiting listening to non-German radio stations in public places, there seemed nothing to fear, just the curious sight of a swastika flag atop the Arc de Triomphe. Next day, as the government straggled into Bordeaux, the cinema Pigalle reopened its doors in Paris. On Sunday 16 June the faithful in many northern parishes, whose priests had fled, had the bizarre experience of hearing Mass read for them by Wehrmacht chaplains.
¹²
With the litany in Latin, only the celebrants’ accents were different.

Also in the north, near Abbeville, British POW Terence Prettie managed to escape from a column of prisoners being marched from Dunkirk towards captivity in Germany. In the several days while he was on the run before recapture, he experienced the gamut of civilian attitudes. One Belgian refugee told him to give himself up because the Germans would treat him well; other homeless Belgian refugees insisted on sharing their precious last chocolate bars with the escapees; a French farmer fed and sheltered Prettie and his companions despite a foraging party of Wehrmacht men politely but insistently requisitioning supplies at the same time; a priest procured for them charts and tide tables in the hope they could find a seaworthy boat that had not been confiscated by the Germans.
¹³

The Académie Française met by tradition every Wednesday, but on 12 June the only
académicien
who turned up was the aged Cardinal Baudrillart, who sat alone beneath the cupola working on the great dictionary. To him, as to many right-wing Catholics, the incoming Germans were welcome as an alternative to the godless communists of Stalin’s USSR. It was on this day that Churchill had his last meeting, before flying back to Britain, with Admiral of the Fleet François-Xavier Darlan. When the British bulldog growled at the man who controlled the fourth largest navy in the world, ‘Darlan, you must never let them get the French fleet’, Darlan promised he would not.
¹⁴

The government’s temporary home 700km to the south-west, Bordeaux had its peacetime population swollen by a half-million refugees. In every restaurant and on the café terraces were to be seen famous faces from the world of politics, literature, entertainment, journalism. Every lapel seemed to sport the Légion d’Honneur. Politicians went through the motions of governing the country by meetings held in hotel corridors and on street corners. High functionaries were reduced to sleeping in corridors or in their cars. Even so august a figure as Marshal Pétain could at first not find a bedroom until offered one in a private home, whose concierge raided her ‘bottom drawer’ to find a set of linen for the marshal’s bed. In the corridors of their temporary accommodation ministers discussed mobilising all male school-leavers and throwing them into the battle against the panzer spearheads advancing at a rate of 50km and more a day. The only thing that stopped such lunacy was the non-availability of uniforms and weapons with which they would have got themselves killed.

All over France, in churches and before war memorials, the mothers, wives and fiancées of soldiers prayed and wept, holding the hands of young sons and daughters terrified by the corpses of men, women, children and animals by the roadside after Stuka attacks. Other planes emblazoned with the swastika bombarded the half-empty cities and the military units still fighting with leaflets reading:

The English warmongers want the war to last another three or five years. People everywhere, however, want peace. EACH OF YOU WILL BEST SERVE HIMSELF AND THE INTERESTS OF HIS COUNTRY IN LIVING FOR FRANCE, RATHER THAN DYING FOR ENGLAND!

Never mind dying
for
anything, the young and old were dying of exhaustion en route. Children, and even babies, had become separated from their parents in the panic of machine-gun attacks by Stuka dive-bombers swooping on the columns of refugees with sirens screaming. Pathetic advertisements in shop windows and those newspapers that still appeared asked for information about a lost child or infant last seen hundreds of kilometres away, or appealed for whoever had stolen a car, a wallet or a handbag to contact the advertiser for a reward. Outside the
mairies
and town halls, crowds gathered for news about food distribution or a roof over their heads, and scanned the boards used for election posters, on which were pinned thousands of requests for news of loved ones. By the end of 1942 the French Red Cross had managed to return nearly 90,000 children lost during the panic of the defeat.

One of the few positive forces in the maelstrom was made up of the courageous women volunteers of the Service Sanitaire Automobile. Using their own vehicles when no official ones were available, they rescued orphaned infants found by the bullet- and shrapnel-torn corpses of their parents. They moved with and against the flood of terrified civilians, convoying bandages, dressings, plasma and blood to hospitals overflowing with injured and sick people, before returning to the dangerous highways and byways to transport the exhausted, the dying and the newly wounded to those hospitals still manned. Often without food for themselves and sleepless for nights on end, they stacked up mileages all the more incredible when one considers the impassable state of many roads and the hundreds of bridges that had been pointlessly blown up by retreating engineer units.

Other women led to safety through the lines the elderly, the infirm and the insane. Others still did what they could for the dead also. Medically trained women pilots of the IPSA
¹⁵
flew badly wounded soldiers to safety almost from the front line. One of them, Germaine L’Herbier Montagnon, logged all sightings of downed aircraft, and spent months afterwards defying the transport chaos, the heat of summer and the snows of winter to trace 500 crash sites on the ground and arrange burial for what remained of the crews.

On 16 June in Bordeaux Reynaud was persuaded by the Comtesse de Portes to resign and seek appointment as ambassador to the US – whether to escape or in an attempt to enlist help from Washington, is unclear. His aides Lecca and Devau had been named Financial Attaché in Washington and Head of the French Purchasing Commission to enable them to travel with a diplomatic bag, whose contents were known to few. Confronted with Reynaud’s resignation, Albert Lebrun, the debonair moustachioed
polytechnicien
President of the Republic, called the leaders of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies to a consultation. All three men were personally in favour of continuing the fight, but Lebrun resisted the house leaders’ urging that Reynaud be invited to form another cabinet, because there was nothing to be gained by it and further indecision would only cost more lives.

In accordance with French tradition, whereby outgoing Prime Ministers suggested likely successors, a few days earlier Reynaud had tentatively put forward the name of Pétain. Lebrun therefore summoned the 84-year-old marshal, who arrived in civilian clothes looking like a stern but benign grandfather. Accustomed during his eight-year term as President to lengthy negotiations in such situations, Lebrun was enormously relieved when Pétain opened his wallet after a couple of minutes and took out the handwritten list of names he proposed including in his cabinet. They were all men with whom he had worked in previous administrations because the marshal had a horror of new faces.

After two hours and with a minimum of wheeling and dealing – in which the 57-year-old wheeler-dealer Pierre Laval was at first in, then out of, the government – all was agreed. At twenty minutes before midnight, Pétain’s cabinet included all thirteen of Reynaud’s ministers who were in favour of an armistice. Among those out of favour was Georges Mandel, who had been arrested while dining in a restaurant with his mistress. Released, he confronted Pétain and received a written apology, which he still had in his pocket when murdered in July 1944 by the marshal’s Milice.

When Pétain called the first meeting of his cabinet, although the short notice and general confusion meant that many were absent, it was agreed and minuted to ask the Germans for an end to the conflict. The urbane and imperturbable Spanish ambassador to France, Señor José-Maria de Lequerica made the ideal neutral channel to relay the cabinet’s decision to the German government. Over an open telephone line, he passed it to St-Jean-de-Luz, where two of his staff forwarded it to the Foreign Ministry in Madrid via Irun, and thence to Berlin.

At 1 a.m. on 17 June, Pétain retired to bed exhausted. An hour later, his Foreign Minister Paul Baudouin personally conveyed the decision to British ambassador Sir Ronald Campbell and Mr Biddle, the US chargé d’affaires – in the absence of Ambassador Bullitt, who had remained in post at the Paris embassy, where the Germans had by now been settling in for three days.

While the marshal slept, in the depopulated cathedral city of Chartres, 41-year-old prefect Jean Moulin was agonising over the best way to kill himself after refusing to sign a German document blaming a unit of French Moroccan infantry for some civilian deaths in St-Georges-sur-Eure resulting from enemy action.
¹⁶
If he signed, innocent men would be shot for the crime. If he refused, he would have to pay the price. Moulin was a handsome debonair divorcee, an accomplished sportsman and talented cartoonist, whose playboy lifestyle disguised a rare breed of courage. Despite being in German custody, he managed to slash his throat with a broken glass, but was resuscitated by his guards.

Sporadic fighting under conditions of total confusion had now reached within 300km of Bordeaux. The German spearheads were at Le Mans, Cherbourg, Rennes and Angers. Near Saumur, the whole
promotion
of cadets from a military academy were pointlessly killed as they attempted to halt a Panzer column in their parade uniforms. In the east of the country an entire army of 400,000 men was encircled and cut off from resupply.

Just after noon on 17 June, Pétain sat down at a microphone hastily rigged in the Préfecture building in Bordeaux, pince-nez perched on his nose, and read a prepared speech to the nation in the voice of a tired old man:

At the request of the President of the Republic, I have taken over as from today the government of France. Confident of the support of our wonderful army, which is fighting with a heroism worthy of its long traditions against an enemy superior in numbers and equipment, I can say with certainty that its magnificent resistance has acquitted all obligations towards our allies. Confident also of the support of the ex-servicemen I have had the honour to command and of the trust of the entire nation, I dedicate myself to the task of resolving France’s misfortunes.

At this painful hour, I send my compassion and my caring to all the unhappy and destitute refugees thronging our roads. It is with a heavy heart that I say to you today that the fighting must stop. Last night, I contacted the enemy to ask soldier-to-soldier whether he can find an honourable way to put an end to the hostilities. May all Frenchmen
¹⁷
rally to my government in these testing times, forgetting their anguish and placing all their faith in the destiny of the Fatherland.

When he heard the news that France was surrendering, King George VI remarked to his mother that it was a great relief not to have to be polite to his foreign allies any longer. She had been born German, as Princess Mary of Teck, and the House of Windsor had only changed its family name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha after three long years of the First World War. Was that really all Britain’s king-emperor felt about the suffering of his Czech, Polish, Belgian, Dutch and French allies?

At that moment four German officers were in the crypt of Les Invalides, recovering the German regimental banners captured during the 1914–18 war. Outside, Parisians were looking at notices warning that they were now forbidden to drive a motor vehicle in the capital. These, however, were minor drawbacks. Virtually 100 per cent of the listening population heaved a sigh of relief that the Saviour of Verdun was now in charge. For them, the war was over – or so they thought.

N
OTES

  
1.
  W. Thornton,
The Liberation of Paris
(London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), pp. 91–2.

  
2.
  P. Burrin,
Living with Defeat
(London: Arnold, 1996), p. 8.

  
3.
  P. Bourget, in
1940:
La Défaite
(Paris: Tallandier, 1978), p. 285.

  
4.
  US War Department, February 1924. US casualties as amended by the Statistical Services Center, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 7 November 1957, quoted in Encyclopaedia Britannica 2002 Deluxe CD-Rom edition.

  
5.
  For greater detail, see D. Boyd,
The French Foreign Legion
(Hersham: Ian Allan Publishing, 2010), pp. 335–50.