MAY 21, 1940
PARIS, FRANCE
11:00 P.M.
There is no war in Paris.
A two-hour drive west from Colonel Charles de Gaulle’s headquarters in Laon, the French capital is “a strange mixed picture of emptiness and normal gaiety,” in the words of one newspaper correspondent.
Paris is in its nightly state of blackout. The air is warm, not yet the thick heat of summer. Waiters in black jackets and long white aprons serve champagne by the light of a full moon as sidewalk cafés do brisk business: wicker chairs, laughter, cigarette smoke, espresso spoons clinking porcelain saucers, a rattle of loose change to pay l’addition. Inside, where it is brightly lit, string quartets perform up-tempo ditties, the music wafting out over the outdoor revelers, musicians hidden from those patrons by blacked-out windows.
The French government has prohibited newspapers from publishing stories of the recent defeats, but the people of Paris know the Germans are coming. It is impossible to believe otherwise, and the pretense of normalcy is growing thin. The city is absent young men, all off to fight in the war. Grand boulevards like the Champs-Élysées are completely empty. Taxis are impossible to find, for reasons no one can explain. Bus service was recently suspended.
As midnight approaches, the revelers are treated to the odd sight of automobiles packed with families, luggage, and pets driving past the bistros. The cars form a slow line, some headed south to the Rive Gauche, others west to the Porte d’Auteuil. Many have a mattress tied to the roof. All are clearly abandoning Paris. It is the well-off from the 8th and 16th arrondissements who have the means to leave behind their jobs, homes, and daily routine. Their despair is overcome by the relief of being safe.*
This is the first sign that Parisians are fleeing, just like the Belgian and Dutch refugees who traveled south into the city. The first wave of refugees from the Low Countries was wealthiest, arriving by car. The second group were able to afford a ticket on “trains packed so tight with humanity, baggage, dogs, and pets that no single other soul could be accommodated,” in the words of the New York Times.
A third wave—the poorest—still walk toward Paris.
“A boot had scattered an ant-hill and the ants were on the march,” French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry will write, viewing the migration from the air. “Laboriously. Without panic. Without hope.”
This shell-shocked mass of humanity fights for space with Allied troops marching into battle from the opposite direction. New York Times correspondent Drew Middleton will later write of a “road filled with refugees. Some afoot, others in farm carts laden with household goods. Down on this march of the helpless swept the Luftwaffe.
“Two ME-109’s with machine guns blazing set about the refugees as though they had been a column of tanks. We could hear the screams from our road.”
After the fighter planes zoom into the distance, Middleton and his driver offer help. But there is nothing they can do. “A youngish woman who’d been pushing her baby in a perambulator was dead. So was her child. Four people on a farm cart had also perished; one of the horses was dead, the other screaming in pain. Calls for help and mercy rose along the length of the column.”
Yet the refugees press on, trickling into the capital after their long journey, desperate to board a train for somewhere very far away. At the Gare de Lyon, Austerlitz, and Montparnasse—all of which provide departures to the safety of southern and western France—hordes of Belgian refugees mingle with desperate Parisians. Babies cry. Elbows create space. The stale air is thick with dried sweat, unchanged diapers, bodies gone a week without bathing.
There is no room for personal luggage in the passenger cars, so policemen in steel helmets collect it all, then push great barrows full of refugee suitcases to the baggage car. Red Cross nurses and doctors squeeze in, tending to women and children. Many refugees have been waiting on their feet since nightfall for departure and will remain standing until, hopefully, arriving in the South of France at dawn.
The Germans are turning northeast, wheeling toward the English Channel and temporarily leaving Paris alone. The feint toward the city was yet another ruse to fool the Allies. Meanwhile, two hundred miles north of Paris, elements of the French, British, and Belgian armies are completely cut off. Pressed on three sides by Nazi forces, they fight by day and retreat toward the sea by night, desperate to avoid annihilation.
But there is no escaping the German onslaught. Men arrive at the English Channel to find beachfront roads cratered from air raids. The normally pleasant ocean scent of seaweed and salty breeze is replaced by the stench of mutilated corpses and rotting flesh. There is no food and most fresh water is contaminated. As the number of Allied troops grows to an astonishing 250,000 British and 110,000 French, thirst and empty bellies only add to the desperation.
Even worse, the long miles of sand offer no protection from German artillery or dive-bombers. One beach, in particular, best illustrates the Allied plight. “At Dunkirk, the spectacle was prodigious, appalling . . . Day and night the sea air was filled with screaming gulls and bats of death,” Time magazine will describe the Stuka attacks.
“When the soldiers reached the sea they hid . . . ‘like rabbits among the dunes,’ ” Time adds. “They were in smoke-grimed rags and tatters, many shoeless, some still lugging packs and rifles, others empty-handed in their underclothes after swimming canals. They were too din-deafened and inured to horror to be fully sensible of the incredible cataclysm that still raged over them. Some clutched souvenirs—a blood soaked doll for a small daughter; a machine gun snatched from a crashed German plane with which one squad of men kept on shooting at new attackers and got two. Ambulatory wounded joined the rest in staggering into the oil-scummed waves.”
The port cities of Calais and Boulogne are filled with Allied soldiers praying in vain for evacuation; both garrisons are being slaughtered as they fight to the last man. Dunkirk is the last line of defense. From the seaside holiday town, where troops might have lolled on the sand as civilians before the war, England is clearly visible on the other side of the Channel. The distance is just twenty-one miles. The alluring sight, so close and yet so far away, nurtures the slimmest of hopes that the Royal Navy will find a way to get them home.
“I had time to reflect on things. I thought of the carnage,” one British engineer will remember of his long hours in Dunkirk. “The piled up dead of civilians and British soldiers, the wrecked buildings and the terrible smell of roasting bodies. I thought of the stream of refugees who had been made homeless by Hitler’s savage onslaught and I wondered how it was all going to end. My thoughts were of home too. I wondered if I would ever see my family and friends again. I thought of the girl I was to marry and wondered if I ever would. My mind would still not accept the fact that we were defeated. I had been bred with the idea of English invincibility, our glorious past and the battles which our soldiers had fought and won against massive odds.”
The Allied forces can retreat no further. Soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force and the French army huddle in the sand, German Stuka dive-bombers and Messerschmitt fighters doing battle with Royal Air Force Spitfires and Hurricanes, but not a rescue ship in sight.
All they can do is wait—and hope.
A rumor travels through the revelers at the sidewalk cafés in Paris, fueled by an official government announcement, passed in whispers and Gallic shrugs: “Arras has fallen.” General Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division has raced all the way across northern France, only to be surprised by a British attack at that vital crossroads. The Allies stunned Rommel by taking control of the battlefield early on, awaiting the promised assistance from the French. But that help never came. Once again, lack of communication is an issue. Seventh Panzer regrouped and pushed the British back.
The battle ended at dusk, little more than two hours ago. The news is already flashing around Paris.
Amiens, another vital choke point, is also under German control. In just eleven days the Germans have taken 2 million French soldiers prisoner, killed another 100,000, and dashed from one side of France to the other without losing a single battle.
Yet, the sidewalk revelers remind themselves, the night is young. There are no Germans in Paris. Arras and Amiens are both one hundred miles north of these grand boulevards. There is little shortage of food and wine, and certainly no reason to end tonight’s party.
Even as the orchestras keep playing on this night under a full moon in Paris, some drinkers put down their champagne coupes and walk home to pack a bag. The Métro is still running and provides quick transport to the main train gares.
But for those who remain at the sidewalk cafés, just blocks from the tumult of the train stations, the wine still flows. Waiters hover from a distance, watching for the raised index finger requesting another pour. Patrons ignore the rumors about German soldiers raping women and disfiguring children in territories they conquer, and of intellectuals being taken away, never to return. During the German conquest of Poland, the capital of Warsaw was heavily bombed and mass executions were conducted by firing squad, an average of two hundred per day. Adolf Hitler explicitly ordered his troops to “kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish descent or language.”
There is no reason to believe the Nazis will treat Paris any differently. If anything, given Adolf Hitler’s public disdain for all things French, the streets could run red with the blood of the butchered.
Yet the party continues. Each man and woman sitting at these tables is aware they must soon choose whether they will remain in Paris if the Germans capture the city or flee beforehand.
Until then, all they can do is wait—and party.