THE BEGINNING OF THE END

TRY to think in terms of millions. Try to think of noise and confusion, of the thick smell of petrol, of the scraping of automobile gears, of shouts, wails, curses, tears. Try to think of a hot sun and underneath it an unbroken stream of humanity flowing southwards from Paris, and you have a picture of the gigantic civilian exodus that presaged the German advance.

I had seen refugees before. I had seen them wending their way along the roads of Spain and Czechoslovakia; straggling across the Polish-Roumanian frontier, trudging down the icy paths of Finland. But I had never seen anything like this. This was the first mechanized evacuation in history. There were some people in carts, some on foot and some on bicycles. But for the most part everyone was in a car.

Those cars, lurching, groaning, backfiring, represented a Noah’s Ark of vehicles. Anything that had four wheels and an engine was pressed into service, no matter what the state of decrepitude; there were taxi-cabs, ice-trucks, bakery vans, perfume wagons, sports roadsters and Paris buses, all of them packed with human beings. I even saw a hearse loaded with children. They crawled along the roads two and three abreast, sometimes cutting across the fields and straddling the ditches. Tom and I caught up with the stream a mile or so outside Paris on the Paris-Dourdan-Chartres road and in the next three hours covered only nine miles.

We saw terrible sights. All along the way cars that had run out of petrol or broken down, were pushed into the fields. Old people, too tired or ill to walk any farther, were lying on the ground under the merciless glare of the sun. We saw one old woman propped up in the ditch with the family clustered around trying to pour some wine down her throat. Often the stream of traffic was held up by cars that stalled and refused to move again. One car ran out of petrol halfway up a hill. It was a bakery van, driven by a woman. Everyone shouted and honked their horns, while she stood in the middle of the road with her four children around her begging someone to give her some petrol. No one had any to spare. Finally, three men climbed out of a truck and in spite of her agonized protests, shoved the car into the ditch. It fell with a crash. The rear axle broke and the household possessions piled on top sprawled across the field. She screamed out a frenzy of abuse, then flung herself on the ground and sobbed. Once again the procession moved on.

In that world of terror, panic and confusion, it was difficult to believe that these were the citizens of Paris, citizens whose forefathers had fought for their freedom like tigers and stormed the Bastille with their bare hands. For the first time, I began to understand what had happened to France. Morale was a question of faith; faith in your cause, faith in your goal, but above all else, faith in your leaders. How could these people have faith in leaders who had abandoned them? Leaders who had given them no directions, no information, no reassurances; who neither had arranged for their evacuation nor called on them to stay at their places and fight for Paris until the last? If this was an example of French leadership, no wonder France was doomed. Everywhere the machinery seemed to have broken down. The dam had begun to crumble and hysteria, a trickle at first, had grown into a torrent.

Even the military roads were overrun with panic-stricken civilians. Tom was an officially accredited war correspondent, so he swung off on to one of them. Although the entrance was patrolled by gendarmes, who demanded our credentials, there was no one to keep traffic from streaming in at the intersections and a mile or so farther on we once again found civilian cars moving along two or three abreast. At one point an artillery unit on its way up to the new front south-east of Paris was blocked by a furniture truck stalled across the road. The driver, with perspiration pouring down his face, was trying to crank the car while the soldiers yelled and cursed at him. One of them paced angrily up and down, saying “Filthy civilians. Filthy, filthy civilians.” At last, the truck got started again and the unit moved past. Another time, a procession of ambulances, with gongs clanging frantically, were held up by congestion on the outskirts of a village for over an hour. The drivers swore loudly but it had little effect; I wondered what was happening to the poor devils inside.

The only military units that succeeded in getting a clear berth were the tanks. Once we looked back to see two powerful fifteen-ton monsters thundering up behind us. They were travelling about forty miles an hour and the effect was remarkable. People gave one look and pulled in to the ditches. They went rolling by, the great treads tearing up the earth and throwing pieces of dirt into the air like a fountain. After them came a number of fast-moving lorries and a string of soldiers on motor-cycles with machine-guns attached to the side-cars. They all seemed in excellent spirits: one of the tanks was gaily marked in chalk “La Petite Marie”, and the trucks and guns were draped with flowers. Two of the motor-cyclists shouted at us, asking if we had any cigarettes. Tom told me to throw them a couple of packages. They were so pleased they signalled us to follow them, escorted us past the long string of civilian cars to the middle of the convoy and placed us firmly between the two tanks. For the next ten or fifteen minutes we roared along at forty miles an hour. Unfortunately, eight or nine miles down the road they turned off, the motor-cyclists waved good-bye and blew us kisses, and once again we found ourselves caught up in the slow-moving procession of evacuees.

It was nearly nine o’clock now and we had covered little more than twenty miles. “I wonder if we’ll make it,” said Tom, looking at his watch. When we had left Paris at five o’clock there were already reports that the Germans were circling around on both sides of the capital to cut off the roads in the rear. Tom had a military map and we decided to try the cross-country lanes. Some of them were scarcely more than footpaths but we could at least average ten or twelve miles an hour, which was a great improvement. It was getting so dark it was difficult to see and twice we barely avoided running over people with no lights on their bicycles. Suddenly the sky lit up with a flash and we heard a far-away rumble. It was the first gunfire I had heard all day. “Something’s creeping up on us,” said Tom. “Still, if we keep on like this, I think we’ll be all right.”

We drove along the twisting lane for five or six miles. It was a relief to be in the open countryside away from the suffocating smell of petrol, but the road was so black the driving was a strain. Tom had some food in the back of the car and we decided to stop and have something to eat. He was in favour of finding a haystack to lean against, but the next few miles of country was barren and rocky. At last we saw a clump of trees outlined in the darkness. It seemed the best we could do, so we pulled over to the side of the road. The car gave a violent lurch and careened into a six-foot ditch. Only the right wheels were gripping the road. The left side was flat against the earth. We were suspended at such a sharp angle we had difficulty in forcing the upper door, but at last succeeded in climbing out.

The rumble of guns seemed to be louder and the flashes against the sky more frequent. “Boches or no Boches,” said Tom, “it looks as though we’re going to linger here a while. Let’s pick out a place to eat, then I’ll see if I can find someone to give us a hand.”

But even here we were frustrated. The field was soaking wet. There was one miserable haystack in the middle of it, damp and soggy. We went back to the road and paced up and down for ten or fifteen minutes, wondering if anyone would pass. It was getting cold and I began to shiver. After having cursed the traffic for hours, it was slightly ironical to find ourselves longing for the sight of a human being.

Tom finally started back to the last village, several miles away, and I climbed back into the car (which was like going down a toboggan slide) to try and get warm. It was a beautiful night. The sky was clear and starry, and the only noise to break the quiet was the drone of crickets and the spasmodic thunder of guns. I wondered how far the Germans had got. Funny to think that people in America probably knew more than we did as to what was going on.

It was nearly midnight when Tom got back again. He had tried a dozen farmhouses but everyone was in bed. At last (with the help of a hundred-franc note) he had extracted a promise from one of the farmers to come at dawn with a team of horses and pull us out.

That was seven precious hours away, but it was the best he could do. As an American citizen, I was in no danger, but if Tom were captured, it meant an internment camp for the rest of the war. He appeared completely unruffled, however, and commented with characteristic English calmness: “Well, there’s nothing to be done about it. Now, let’s eat. God, I’m hungry.”

We sat by the roadside, drinking wine and munching bread and cheese; then we got out all the coats and sweaters we could find, wrapped them round us, and climbed back into the car. The angle was so uncomfortable I slept only by fits and starts, expecting momentarily to be awakened by the noise of German tanks. Luckily, no such startling developments took place. The farmer kept his promise and shortly after five o’clock appeared with two large fat white horses who pulled the car out as easily as though it had been a perambulator. Once again we started on our way.