THE spring months usually found my wife and me touring the vineyards and cellars of France, but in 1940 war conditions necessitated a reversal of our normal procedure and by prearrangement the various vineyard proprietors were to meet us in Paris.
On May 9 we dined at Ciro’s with the Jacques Bollingers,{1} who were leaving the next morning for their place in Ay. The restaurant was crowded, the atmosphere thick with cigarette smoke and the scent of rich sauces and well-dressed women. The hum of conversation, laughter, music, dancing. No restrictions on the quantity or quality of food. Outside the street lamps were dimmed to a blue glow, but within all was light and merriment. Somewhere, far away, two armies faced one another from behind impregnable walls. Meanwhile, life in the capital went on as usual. Dorothy Thompson was in town. The Duff Coopers had just gone back to London. Chevalier was at the Casino. As always, there were rumors. Daladier and the Marquise de Crussol were soon to be replaced by Reynaud.
“La porte à côté,” as Jacques put it, was about to slam on “la sardine qui s’est crue sole.” Weygand was returning from Syria to take over from Gamelin, and there was talk of an up-and-coming young colonel called Charles de Gaulle.
At midnight we stepped through the curtained glass doors into the dark, silent street. Bright stars shone from the patches of clear sky between high banks of clouds.
“A perfect night for an air raid,” my wife said.
Jacques looked up at the sky.
“You can smell Germans from a long distance away,” he said.
“Yes, I believe I can,” she replied.
At dawn the siren sounded. By the second wail we were up and dressing, so quickly does one’s mind readjust to past experience. In the lobby the night concierge was stretching and rubbing his eyes. We went out into the street. Chimney pots and the trees of the Champs Élysées black against a gray sky. The crackle of antiaircraft guns. People in doorways and on the sidewalk. Men in dressing gowns and slippers, smoking cigarettes. Women in every stage of dress and undress, some of them exercising lap dogs. Bored little girls in curl papers.
Someone said, “There they are,” and pointed directly overhead. Eyes turned upward and voices hushed. In the silence the drone of engines plainly audible. Then, we saw them. Five dark birds flying close formation. Clusters of air bursts, pink in the morning sun, surrounded them. A prayer that at least one burst might find its target, but with slow, deliberate progress the marauders passed safely out of sight. A little later the all-clear sounded.
The sun rose higher and warmer, glinting on the glass roof of the Petit Palais. Pigeons strutted complacently about under the marronniers. Waiters in shirt sleeves arranging the iron tables and chairs of the sidewalk café. A fat woman in a moth-eaten sweater taking down the shutters of her news kiosk. Children on roller skates. A boy in a black sateen apron rode by on a bicycle, carrying a basket filled with long loaves of bread. He was whistling. Paris, fresh and immaculate under the blue sky, prepared for a new day.
The day was the fateful tenth of May, 1940. At nine o’clock the French Ministry of Information telephoned to announce that the German Army had struck through Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The “phony war” came to a sudden end. The Western world reeled under the impact of “the first shock”—in Mr. Churchill’s words—“of the most merciless of all wars of which record has been kept.” It took time to sink in. Perhaps that is why it seemed such a long day.
For the tenth of May, 1940, was a long day—a day of extra editions, black headlines, and hourly radio announcements, each less reassuring than the last. For my wife and myself in our hotel room near the Rond Point it was a working day. The first of our visiting vineyard friends to arrive was Monsieur Louis Latour of Beaune. Punctual to the dot, he arrived at 10 A.M. with a small black bag fitted with neat rows of phials, each containing a specimen of his 1937’s—Corton, Chambertin, Meursault. Pouilly and other assorted Burgundies. Glasses were set up, evaluations made, prices discussed, provisional reserves duly set aside. In the next room a radio droned interminable meaningless phrases and from the street below rose the raucous voices of news vendors hawking calamity.
Around noon a non-business acquaintance dropped in to impart a particularly pessimistic news flash. The array of goblets appeared to shock him.
“The world is crashing around our ears,” he exclaimed, “and this is the way you spend your morning?”
Monsieur Latour was packing his little black bag. Snapping it shut, he gave a slight shrug.
“One must continue to work,” he said.
Other visitors, from Chablis, Alsace, Anjou, the Côtes du Rhône. By the end of the day we had toured, by proxy, most of the famous wine regions of France.
Most, but not all. Two—perhaps the most important two—remained. Champagne and Bordeaux. So after much wangling we managed a few days later to catch a ride to Épernay with a French liaison officer. Already half deserted, this important champagne center, with its empty streets and shell-scarred buildings, presented the appearance of World War I. From the cornice of a hotel on the main square a crashed German plane hung crazily.
“Could you take us over to Ay?” we asked our French friend.
“Why Ay?” he asked.
“To see a very old friend, Jacques Bollinger.”
His face lit up. “Why, I’ve known him all my life,” he said. “But I thought he was in Paris “
“No, he is mayor of Ay and he is still there.”
“The Germans are now within three or four miles of Ay,” he said, “but if the bridge isn’t down we ought to be able to make it.”
We did. It was after dark when we rang the familiar doorbell of the Bollinger house. Jacques himself answered it and after an exclamation of surprise led us into the sitting room. His wife, Lily, was by the fireplace, in which a bundle of charred papers was still burning. We transacted our business and by nine o’clock were ready to leave.
“Why don’t you come back to Paris with us?” my wife asked Lily. “No,” she said, “Jacques is the mayor of Ay and our place is here.” As a nightcap and a gesture to World War I, in which Jacques was a combat pilot, he brought up from his cellar a bottle of his great 1915 vintage.
“À bientôt,” he toasted.
It was not to be. He did not survive the war, but I can see him now by the fireplace, burning his papers as his father had done before him in 1914, and as his grandfather had done before him in 1870. Burning their papers and sticking to their jobs.
Back in Paris, as we went about our small routine affairs, each day the radio ground out its grist of ominous news. “The Germans are on the Albert Canal.” Sedan and the Ardennes. The collapse of Corap’s Ninth Army. The voice of Reynaud, shaking with cold anger. “On the order of its King, without warning to its French and British comrades, the Belgian Army has suddenly and unconditionally capitulated. This is an event without precedent in history.” Next day, Duff Cooper. “This is no time for recriminations. Even if the Allies lost this battle, we shall not have lost the war.”
Dunkirk. General Alexander the last man off the beach. Above and over all the reverberating nouns of England’s new Prime Minister. “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
At long last the embassy told us we had better get going. My old friend Bunny Carter,{2} obliged to remain in Paris to move his bank to Bordeaux, gave us his plane reservations for New York and on June 7 we squeezed ourselves—quite literally—into the Sud-Express for Bordeaux. A long trip and a sad one. At the Bordeaux station, amidst scenes of indescribable confusion, we finally, by a miracle, connected with our old friend Francis de Luze, who had come to meet us and take us out to his house for the night. Until a late hour we discussed matters of common interest—including the great clarets and sauternes of 1937. Next day he saw us off at the station on our last leg to Lisbon and the Clipper home.
In the quiet hall of Lisbon’s Avize Hotel the radio murmured in desultory fashion. “We interrupt this program...” Someone turned up the volume. Squak, splutter, squak. Normal now. A familiar voice. “The hand that held the dagger...”
As our Pan American Clipper winged its way westward over a glittering sea, Mussolini’s troops moved into Nice and Corsica and the vanguard of the German Army marched down the Champs Élysées.