In January 1920, when I was about two and a half, my mother started what she called a ‘Book of Richard’ in a small notebook with hard black covers, which I found among her papers after her death at the age of eighty-five, in 1962. It is a very private chronicle of no literary pretension and little general interest, devoted as it is to most of the things that a mother might note about a small child: the struggling, squeaky beginnings of speech and of counting, the appearance of first teeth, then their loss, the first visit to a dentist, the recurrence of coughs, colds and tummy troubles, the tantrums provoked by the onset of some awful children’s party (a form of torture common in middle-class circles in southern England in the 1920s), the first departure for school, the first time on a train, and the growing evidence of naughtiness (though I was glad to note that my worst crime – the havoc caused by my air gun to some forty windows – each still had a white circle of paint in the middle, as if in invitation to target practice – in a block of new houses and to the green buses of the Autocar company, and the consequent loss of a Kruger sovereign – had remained undetected).
From my Book I learn, among other matters of private interest, that in May 1924, at the time of my seventh birthday, while staying with my uncle, a doctor in Chelsea, having noticed ‘Made in France’ on the back of a dinner plate, I remarked, at table: ‘the lavatory was made in the Midlands’ (this rather acute social observation referred undoubtedly to Royal Doulton’s standard pan, ‘Golden Flush’, in willow-pattern blue on a white background – I think most children would be attentive to the colour, design, and wording of the interior of a lavatory pan).
Now for teeth. I had eight at nine months, and lost my first tooth in gingerbread in June 1923. I had already had my first visit to the dentist two years earlier. But there is no more about teeth. Alas! I could fill in the missing chronicle of dental decay, extractions, the drill, agonizing fillings, even more agonizing killing of nerves with a squiggly instrument, for teeth have provided me with the most reliable and consistent private calendar. All the most important events of my career have been marked and emphasized by the accompaniment of agonizing toothache: my award of a scholarship to Oxford in December 1934, and, above all, what should have been the happiest day of my life, my release from the British army and my return to a civilian status, longed for every day of the previous four-and-a-half years. (I used to say to myself that, if I ever returned to civilian life, I would never, never complain, and that I would remind myself, if things seemed particularly gloomy, that at least I was no longer in uniform: a therapy that has worked wonderfully well for the last thirty-eight years even though, after all these years, I still have recurrent nightmares in which I am remobilized.) In September 1946, the complicated process of demobilization, spread over from Iserlohn, via Münster, Harborn – where we were disarmed (and how infinitely glad I was to see my sten go!) – and Hull, to the demobilization camp at Guilford, took, in all, just over a week, but the joy of escape from uniform and of survival was marred by continuous jagged pain, day and night, and only slightly checked by regular intakes of schnapps. The very first act of my free life as a civilian was to have myself driven by taxi to a dentist in the Edgware Road – the taxi driver assured me he was cheap. Smelling of whisky, this very drunken Scot injected me with a dirty needle – I had noticed him wiping it on his blood-stained white (or once white) coat, and had been past caring (it was too late anyway) with the result that, on my second day as a free civilian, my gum swelled up with pus, causing a second visit, this time to a more reputable dentist, on Mount Ephraim, Royal Tunbridge Wells, who set about draining my gum.
Earlier, before my release from military servitude, while in Iserlohn, I had had recourse to a German (civilian) dentist, in an impeccably clean white coat – a very rare article in the Ruhr in 1946 – whose assistant provided the power for the drill by riding a bicycle contraption – and whom I paid, most gratefully, in cigarettes. Earlier still, while in a sealed camp in May 1944, I had had a tooth extracted by a Cypriot dentist who sweated in the effort. In a very long chronicle of pain, set like background music – a sort of dental obligato – to public events, one occasion springs out as agonizingly and unrelentingly as the week-long top-jaw throb of demobilization. I had had a nerve killed on one of my visits to the dentist on Mount Ephraim. I had then started to walk home across Tunbridge Wells Common when, all at once, the nerve started on a prolonged death agony during which I lay writhing on the ground, looking at the 1916 tank which used to stand, throughout my childhood – it was removed, for some reason, at the beginning of the Second World War – outside the General Post Office on a little triangle of grass. Oh yes! I could fill in that chronicle all right! indeed, I think perhaps the third-happiest – the second-happiest would be the birth of my little boy, William, in April 1980 – day of my life, (but, of course, not comparable to the joy and relief of becoming a civilian and of regaining freedom and privacy) was when I got rid of the last six or seven of the wretched things in 1973.
I had a special word for soldiers in 1918, when I was just over a year and when the First World War still had six more frightful months to run before the Armistice. This is not surprising because they must have been very much in evidence both in Colchester, a garrison town and the home of my grandparents, and in Frinton, near where there were coastal artillery batteries on the Naze. I cannot actually remember any individual soldiers, but what I can still recall is the presence of the colour of khaki, at eye level, to the left of my pram and moving along with it. Just a khaki blur, floating along like a cloud; but also the smell of Brasso – I identified that particular army smell much later – and of tobacco. My nanny, Kate Scurrell, was, though rather sharp-featured, quite a good-looking girl, her face reddened by the east winds off the German Sea. Anyhow, the walking khaki blur and the cloying smell of Brasso seemed to accompany me in my pram rides more often than not, competing with the east wind, the changing texture of the sea, the brightness of the East Anglian skies, and the rich, lush colour of the Greensward, as claims on my earliest sensations of colour and smell.
We moved to Tunbridge Wells in May 1920, when I was just four. I don’t remember the move, but the date is in my ‘Book’. There was no hint at all of a khaki presence in the Royal Borough, much too respectable a place to tolerate the presence or even the proximity of a garrison. (Poor Tunbridge Wells was later punished by becoming, in 1940, the headquarters of Southeastern Command: I date its social decline from then.) Men in civilian clothes – sometimes, in the summer, not in very many of them – would suddenly appear, as on a prearranged signal, during my walks with my nanny on the Common. I quite welcomed these intruders, as they generally gave me sweets and told me to be a good boy and to stay put and not to wander off, as, singly, they went off among the tall ferns with Kate for a few minutes. The man who kept the antique shop on Mount Pleasant was called Major Morland; there was also a Colonel Howarth – rather distant echoes of a military society. And, on our walks, I would look out for the wooden shacks and stovepipe chimneys of the half-dozen local hermits, on wasteland, in boggy fields, or in thick undergrowth. There was also one living in a small tent in a field on the north side of the town. He wore greying cricket trousers, held up by a red and black boy scout belt with a serpent clasp – the serpent biting its own tail – dirty gym shoes, and an old blazer. He was bearded, long-haired, wild-looking and well spoken (generally while talking to himself out loud); and he went from door to door selling boot brushes, boot polish and yellow dusters, and, sometimes, just boxes of matches. My mother told me that I must be nice to him, as he was ‘shell-shocked’. I think perhaps all the other local hermits were, too. Whether they had also been the pathetic débris of the officer corps I could not tell, for I never heard them speak, though it was said of the one who lived in a cave half-way down the rocks of Happy Valley that he had ‘a good accent’. Such were their independence, their ability to rough it, even through the long wet winters, and their ingenuity in constructing for themselves ramshackle retreats that had some modest pretensions to a sort of bizarre elegance, that I think, in retrospect, that they must have been former officers, for ordinary soldiers would not have opted for such intense discomfort but would have got their feet under the table in some warm kitchen. Other ‘temporary gentlemen’ survivors went in, like the father of the war poet Keith Douglas, for chicken farming in the neighbourhood of the town; my parents said that they nearly always went bankrupt within a matter of months. Perhaps the next stage from there would be a leafy wooden hermitage with a roof of corrugated iron held down by large stones.
These were the only visible débris of the war. There were no one-legged men to be seen; indeed, in a community so middle-class, their presence would not have been appreciated. Such people should be shut away somewhere where ‘they would be properly looked after’. There could be flag days for the blind, but the blind themselves would remain as unseen as unseeing. I tended to regard them as somehow unreal, a strange, alien collectivity, almost as a concept, about whom grown-ups talked obliquely, in low voices and with pity. They did not seem to have any reality.
It is strange that, through all my years at school – kindergarten, prep school, Shrewsbury – and at Oxford, I never came across any boy who had had a father killed in the war. My own father had spent the war (reluctantly, so my mother told me, and I must say I found such reluctance pretty silly; surely any sane person would have been happy to miss the war?) in the Soudan. Only my Chelsea uncle had served as an army doctor; but he never referred to his years in uniform and earned my intense and early admiration by referring to his neighbour in the village of Etchingham as ‘Mr Rudyard Bloody Kipling’. Of course, there was a war memorial as well as the tank. On November 11th there would be a Two Minutes’ Silence; from thirteen onwards, I would regard it as a matter of honour to talk loudly through it. At school, and in books written for boys, one was so constantly reminded that we had won the war that my school friends and I found our curiosity excited by those who had lost it. Losing seemed much more original and stimulating than winning, and one got so fed up with all the smooth-faced subalterns who outwitted the entire German fleet or who captured a secret zeppelin. I think that by about thirteen I had already come to recognize what should be a golden rule for any historian: ‘Let us assume that our own country is always wrong’ – certainly an excellent starting point. In my ‘Book’, under June 1933, my mother has written: ‘Began to wish to get rid of law and order! and war.’ No doubt a middle-class parental oversimplification on the subject of law and order, but certainly a fair comment on my attitude, at sixteen, to the last. Most of my close friends at Shrewsbury shared such views; we were appalled by bayonet practice on dummies in sacking. I even went to the extent of failing – with some difficulty, though I made sure that I got every answer wrong – Certificate A, known among ourselves as ‘the Death Certificate’. I did not wish to become a subaltern, which would mean leading my platoon out of the trench, holding my little swagger stick. Of course, we were all thinking in terms of the previous war: bayonets, swagger sticks, the endless lists on the school war memorial, Lewis guns that invariably jammed, Four O’Clock Bushy-Topped Tree (the method used to direct the fire of light or medium artillery). So were those who tried to train us.
At Merton College, Oxford, the prospect of war dominated our thoughts and occupied much of our private conversations through the night. There seemed little doubt, between 1935 and 1938, that it would come. What were we to do? We came up with various solutions. One of my friends set about learning Swedish and putting money away regularly in a Stockholm bank. He was convinced that there would be sufficient advance warning to get out of the island before the government started introducing exit permits. He actually spent the war in Sweden, and got a decoration for services rendered to intelligence. Most of my friends opted for conscientious objection on religious grounds, not because they were religious, but because it was the only way to become an officially recognized CO. I spent a lot of time going to Oxford Town Hall, where the CO tribunal met, to attest to my friends’ deep and lasting attachment to this recognized religion or that (Buddhism would not have washed). As my mother lived in the most middle-class town in England and played tennis and croquet at the Nevill Club and bridge at the Kent and Sussex Club, I could not possibly have become a CO. It would have distressed her much too much. There were also in my College a few young bloods, including Leonard and Charles Cheshire, who longed for war; but they were not among my friends. Most accepted the inevitability of war with reluctance, while recognizing that it might be necessary. It would be a war against fascism. If only we could be sure of getting the Red Army as our allies! I daresay a few never even gave a thought to the war, but I never met them. There was one undergraduate who had an artificial leg that he took off at night. He did not have to worry!
The Munich crisis found me in Paris. I was a one hundred percent munichois, immensely and quite physically relieved (it was perhaps one of the rare happy events in my life not to be marred by toothache). It might give me – who knows? – another six months in the Archives. I would never have dared count on another whole year of peace. I remember explaining my reactions to an American friend, as we crossed the pont d’Arcole in September 1938. I said my priority was to get on with my research. ‘I would feel like a rat,’ he observed, at the revelation of such single-minded selfishness. I did not mind feeling like a rat.
My position at the time was reasonable, if not elevating. I thought a war against Hitler was necessary, but I did not myself want to take part in it. The two things did not seem incompatible. ‘Suppose everyone felt as you do,’ someone objected; I argued that this would not happen, as most people were not such extreme individualists as myself. I wrote to my history tutor at Merton to express my profound relief at Munich and got a letter back from him in which he stated that I was the most selfish person he had ever encountered and that I thought myself the centre of the earth. I certainly thought that – well, wasn’t I?
Matters were for a time taken out of my hands. I returned to England in August 1939 feeling extremely ill. X rays revealed that I had pleurisy, with a largish spot on one lung. I remained ill till the end of the year, attending my army medical board in December, when I was found temporarily unfit for service in the forces. I was so pleased that I took a friend out to a grand dinner at the Calverley Hotel the night of my return from Maidstone.
It was a reprieve. But I could not count on a second one; and every day my health was getting better. I spent January and February 1940 writing to British consuls in neutral countries in search of a job that would take me out of Britain and her dependencies. I acquired a great many exotic stamps in pretty colours, but no job. However, some time in the spring of that terrible year, I was interviewed in London by the British Council and offered a job as a teacher of history, French and English at a preparatory school for the sons of the employees of Callender’s Cables at Carcavelhos, between Lisbon and Estoril. I even signed a contract. It seemed an ideal job. I bought myself a Teach Yourself Portuguese, in its bright yellow cover, in an effort to come to terms with that strangely nasal and half-swallowed language. I also organized a farewell dinner at the Café Royal with my closest friends, promising to send them postcards from Portugal at regular intervals. I then took my passport and my contract to the passport office in order to apply for an exit permit. To my fury, it was refused me by the Ministry of Labour. My fury was further fuelled by my meeting, in a queue, a school friend of mine who triumphantly brandished a brand new green Irish passport that he had just obtained, which enabled him to pass the rest of the war in Dublin. I had never realized that he was even remotely Irish. The state had got the better of me.
But I was not regraded medically for a further eighteen months, and meanwhile I secured an Air Ministry assignment teaching English to Polish and Czech air crew. At the same time, I volunteered for, and was accepted by, the Free French. If I had to serve in an army, it would be much more interesting to do so in a foreign one; there could indeed be no better way to get inside a foreign society. It even seemed worth the extra risk, for it was unlikely that there would be any quiet berths in an army as small as the FFL. It was certainly pushing francophilia rather far, but my enthusiasm was genuine.
At much the same time, I was medically regraded. A little later, before I was actually in the FFL, I received an OHMS envelope containing a mobilization notice, a transport voucher, a postal order and a photograph of George VI telling me: ‘We welcome you into Our Army.’ But I did not want to be in their army, so I sent the travel warrant, the mobilization order, the postal order, and the photograph and welcome back, with a polite and patient letter in which I explained that I had already been accepted for service with the Free French. I received three more similar missives with the same contents, which I likewise sent back. The trouble was that the Free French could not actually admit me until they had received a clearance from the Ministry of Labour, and this my old enemy would not grant. It was a prolonged and obstinate rearguard action in the course of which I enlisted the help of two MPs, while my mother actually managed to beard the Minister of War, Sir Edward Grigg; she had the persistence and assurance of a Victorian middle-class background. But, of course, blind bureaucracy won in the end. I was arrested and spent the inside of a week in Tunbridge Wells gaol awaiting the arrival of my military escort, both Londoners, who had used the occasion to stop off for a few nights at their homes. They turned up in the end; but when we reached Paddington, it was discovered that there was no train to Chepstow, the training camp, for about six hours. They had spent all their money and did not know what to do with the unexpected – but apparently useless – bonus of six extra hours in the metropolis. I pointed out that, in the sealed OHMS envelope containing the contents of my pockets and my braces, there was also a sum of a little over £6. I suggested that this should be used on food and drink for the three of us. After a short debate, they agreed that the envelope should be opened, the money recovered, and the envelope then resealed. We spent the rest of the day drinking, and I was able to get my escort, a staff-sergeant and a corporal – with the active help of two sailors who took the legs while I took the arms – onto a midnight train. They at once fell asleep lying in the corridor, and we overshot Chepstow, my escort not waking up till Swansea. By the time we got back to Chepstow, it was past eleven, and we all agreed that drinks were called for. We eventually reached the gates of the camp a bit after three, arm in arm and singing. The escort and myself were put in the guardhouse to cool off. My escort were both stripped, and the next day I was brought before the adjutant, who asked me if I were prepared to ‘soldier’; on my assuring him I was, he released me for ordinary duties. The circumstances of my arrival had by now reached my fellow recruits, who treated me with a mixture of awe and puzzled admiration. I felt that my entry into His Majesty’s Forces had a Švejk-like quality. But, unlike Švejk and his creator, I never deserted, never even contemplated desertion. Like Švejk, I was a reluctant and untidy soldier, but I soon discovered that the army was not nearly as bad as I had feared, that one could enjoy very good company in it, and that I was only rarely in positions of physical danger. I was also very lucky in all my postings.
The origins of the present study are both accidental and varied. Ten years ago, while walking on Zooma Beach with a graduate pupil of Eugen Weber from the University of California, Los Angeles, I was told by the young man that he intended doing research on civilian life in occupied France during the First World War. Did I have any ideas about possible sources? All I could come up with at the time were the novel, Invasion 14, by Maxence van der Meersch, the newspaper, La Gazette des Ardennes, and such personal memoirs as he could lay hold of. I also suggested that he should interview people living in the Nord or elsewhere behind the Front who had been children in 1914–18. Some years later, I enquired of Eugen Weber about the progress of the young man’s research. He told me that he had indeed gone to Lille, but that, once there, he had abandoned historical research for the teaching of English in a commercial school, that he had married a girl from Béthune, the daughter of a Polish miner and a Frenchwoman, and that he had settled in the Nord. It seemed to me that he had taken the better course.
In the summer of 1979, I was asked by Professor Geoffrey Best of the University of Sussex if I would like to take part in a series of lectures to be given in the autumn on the general theme of ‘Occupier and Occupied’. I agreed to give a lecture on occupied France, 1914–18. At much the same time, the late Lord Boyle, Vice Chancellor of the University of Leeds (where I was once a lecturer and where I met my wife when she was a student there) invited me to give one of the public winter lectures organized by the university, and I chose as my subject Vichy France, as viewed primarily from the Northeast. The same winter, I was asked by my good friend and former pupil, Professor Bernard Wasserstein, if I would be prepared to give two or three of the Helmsley Lectures at Brandeis University in the spring of 1981. To this I agreed most readily. At Brandeis I lectured on both occupations of France, as well as on those of Belgium, and gave seminar talks on the French records and on the Thermidorian régime. In the course of the academic year, I gave four lectures on the first occupation, four on Vichy, and sixteen on Paris collaborationism, the origin of the two chapters devoted to that subject.
I am not a military historian, and this is neither the work of a specialist nor the product of original research, though, in the past, I have undertaken detailed research, in the French and Belgian records, on the relations between occupants and occupés in the nine Départements Réunis (the present-day Belgium) from 1795 to 1807, so that the general nature of the subject is not unfamiliar to me. I also discovered, much to my surprise, that little work had been done on civilian life behind the Front in the occupied Northeast during the First World War. My study is more an essay in interpretation and a very tentative approach to the elusive problems of the relations between soldiers and civilians, occupants and occupés, both seen as individuals rather than as collectivities. I make no apology for relying heavily on literary sources, on works of imagination, on my own explorations into necessarily tentative and groping interpretations – for history at this very often private, intimate level is not easily documented – as well as on my own personal experience, working as a soldier in close contact with civilian authorities and with individual families in France, Belgium and Germany, from July 1944 to September 1946. I hope that some at least of my suggestions may prove fruitful and illuminating to those who might wish to take them a stage further; but my main concern is that the present study – one as much of individuals as of groups – should make enjoyable reading.
I would like to have been able once more to thank the late Louis Guilloux for having told me so much about his own experiences in Paris and in Saint-Brieuc between 1939 and 1944, when I met him in July 1966. (I wish I could thank him too, in person, for having included me – so flatteringly, almost as if I had entered French literature, par la grande porte, rue Sébastien-Bottin – in the second volume of his Carnets, published posthumously in April 1982.) During a recent visit to Paris, I was given a graphic account by my old friend Arthur Birembaut, who was nine when his part of the Pas-de-Calais was invaded, of his childhood experiences in Hénin-Liétard and in and around Bapaume, between 1914 and 1917. He described to me two rows of men, the one red and blue, the other field grey, facing one another across a field of sugar beet, a strange and constant whooshing noise, like a long-sustained sigh, coming between them, as if arising from the ground; he had felt no sense of danger as he eagerly watched the peculiar scene from a balcony of his grandmother’s farm, for he could not imagine what two groups of coloured men lined up in rows could be doing lying in the beet in the hot sun. It seemed an odd sort of game. He graphically communicated his sense of amazement when, on being ‘repatriated’ to unoccupied France via Switzerland in 1917, he had arrived in Bâle and seen the streets of the Swiss town crowded with young men. He had not up till then been aware of the negative fact of their absence from his visual world. Nothing can replace the acuity of a child’s observation; and he managed to recreate, for my benefit, some minor military engagement in the early stages of the war, in August/September 1914, in all its visual inconsequence as viewed by a child.
I have greatly profited from many conversations, most of them in Worcester Garden, with Mike Weaver, Reader in American Literature at Oxford, on the subject of Jacques Benoist-Méchin, the first translator into French of Ezra Pound. My friend and colleague, Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, Fellow and Tutor in History at University College, Oxford, has rendered valuable assistance by translating for me passages of Bavarian slang from the Liller Kriegszeitung and by having made me a present of an illustrated edition of La Gazette des Ardennes of 1st August 1916. He was also kind enough to put me in touch with Professor Umbreit, of the University of Freiburg-im-Breisgau, who gave me valuable information on the subject of German military legislation for the period of the second occupation. My friend and successor at Balliol College, Oxford, Dr. Colin Lucas, very kindly gave me his copy of the memoirs of Paquis, which I have used extensively. My greatest debt is to my friend and colleague, Wilfred Halls, of the Oxford Institute of Education, the author of a brilliant study of the youth policies of the Vichy régime, who has been tirelessly generous in opening to me his considerable archive, mostly derived from normally closed sources in Lille and in Paris. If, as he claims, I encouraged him in the early stages of his work, I can say the same for what he has done for me. I have been very lucky to have a friend in such close proximity whom I could consult, at any time, on Vichy educational and religious matters. I have also profited from conversations with Roderick Kedward, of the University of Sussex, on the early period of Vichy, the subject of his excellent book. Professor Michael Marrus, of the University of Toronto, has been generous with unpublished information about the fate of the Belgian Jews during the second occupation. I would also like to thank my faithful and eccentric lecture audience (including the city planning officer of Los Angeles) who have sat out my Guinness-aided (a pint a lecture) lectures on Paris collaborationism, and who have not appeared to wilt under my sometimes lengthy quotations in direct French speech, including a good deal of Paris slang. From start to finish, this has been very much a spoken book (this is how it grew and grew) and if my readers can actually hear the speech, I shall have achieved one of the things that I set out to do.
I would like to thank the members of the History Department and the Tauber Institute at Brandeis for having given me such a tremendous welcome and for having made my stay there so enjoyable. And, above all, my warmest thanks go to Bernie Wasserstein for a fine combination of persistence and patience in nudging me slowly forward towards the completion of this book. He is not, however, to be blamed for any of its mistakes or imperfections. These are mine, and mine alone.