Did you keep faith with me? When all was well
Yes; but I clave to you when all was not.
And, when temptation touched your citadel,
Your weakness won again, and you forgot—
Forgot your Self, and freedom and your friends,
Even interest; and now our vaunted glow
Becomes a blush, as the long story ends
In sorry separation at Bordeaux.
ROBERT VANSITTART.
OUR trip to Bordeaux was off the beaten track. When I think of it now I think of stately châteaux, cool rivers, wooded glens, wine, sunshine and flowers. Although the main highways were choked with terror and misery, with the smell of petrol and the roll of gunwheels, the country lanes belonged to another world. We found housewives gossiping on the crooked village streets and peasants working in the fields as peacefully as they always had. Their lives seemed so detached from the turmoil around them we began to wonder if they even knew a war was going on.
Certainly few seemed to know how critical things were. When we talked to them the majority shrugged their shoulders and said they had so little news it was impossible to judge the situation. Many had not even learned that the Germans had occupied Paris twenty-four hours before. (The French communiqué never announced the German entry—it merely stated that French troops had withdrawn to both sides of the capital “according to the plans of the French Command, aimed at sparing Paris the devastation which defence would have involved”. After that Paris was not referred to again.) The people in the country had either not heard the communiqué or not grasped what it meant. At any rate, they showed little alarm. The deepest doubt we heard expressed was from an old farmer who leaned over a fence, pitchfork in hand, to talk to Eddie and me. He said he didn’t like the sound of things, scratched his head and asked gravely: “Are we so sure we are going to win?”
We spent that night in a field near a brook on the outskirts of a tiny village. We pitched our tent and got out the blankets, our food and cooking apparatus. We dined on pâté de foie gras, chicken galantine, sardines, pickles, onions, bread, cheese and wine. We lay on the grass and talked for hours about France. Suddenly Harold King said: “It’s funny how already we discuss France in the past tense.”
“Well, there’s no use fooling ourselves,” said Eddie. “It is past. Past and finished. God, think of the Germans drinking this wine!”
The next morning we strolled down to the village, about half a mile away. It consisted of only a dozen houses, clustered around an old church; of a petrol pump, a café and an over-cluttered shop which was doing a thriving business selling everything from ribbons to wine.
At eleven o’clock the church bells started pealing for High Mass, and mothers and children, in their best Sunday clothes and neat, polished shoes, began assembling in the churchyard. We went into the café where half a dozen people were gathered. We asked for the vin du pays and a small boy brought us a jug of Vouvray. Certainly it was an odd and peaceful scene for a Sunday which will go down in history as the day when the Reynaud Government fell and the Republic of France entered the final phase of its collapse. The people around us were discussing the war; they were bewildered by what had happened to Paris, for they thought it was to be defended to the last. One said hopefully: “Perhaps all this is a trick to trap the Germans.” Another, a woman with a broad face and rough red hands: “Oh, well, Paris is not important. It is just another city.” As Paris was as dear to most French people as their own villages, this struck us as an extraordinary remark. We understood when we discovered she was a Belgian refugee from Liége. When we asked her opinion of King Leopold, she lifted her hands in anger and said: “Cochon.”
The most vivid character in the village was the café proprietress—an old woman of seventy-eight. She looked as though she had stepped out of a Flaubert novel; she was dressed in black with a voluminous skirt and a small white cap on her head. She had a brown, wrinkled face that lighted up with amusement. She was evidently the matriarch of the village, for people listened to her respectfully and whenever she wanted anything done everyone scurried about in half a dozen directions. She was so excited at our arrival she insisted on serving us herself. She kept hovering about, murmuring: “The brave, brave English. Together we will drive the Boches back. Eh? Is it not so?” Each time she demanded an answer: when she got it, she nodded with immense satisfaction. She went on to say she was not depressed by the news of Paris. All her life she had been troubled by the Boches, but in the end things always came right. She could remember the war of 1870, for she was eight years old at the time. In the war of 1914 her sons had fought, and to-day her grandsons were at the front. “This war is the hardest,” she sighed. “But since it would be better to be dead than live under Hitler, we must never surrender. Eh? Is it not so?” We nodded. “Bon! Now you brave Englishmen will have some more wine, won’t you?”
The brave Englishmen did. In fact the only thing that got us started for Bordeaux at all was that Gordon Waterfield’s portable radio informed us the French Cabinet was meeting again that afternoon and would make an important announcement that night. Reluctantly we left. Although Marshal Pétain may have most of France in his pocket to-day, I’m willing to bet our little village is still die-hard anti-Hitler—and will stay that way as long as the old proprietress has a breath left in her body.
On the last lap of our journey to Bordeaux we passed a good many towns and villages inundated with refugees. Wherever we found refugees we found panic. Dr. Goebbels couldn’t have found a more effective method of spreading alarm and despondency; but it was not until that very day, June 16th, that the French Government took any measure to prevent it, for the first time requesting people to remain where they were.
Bordeaux was Tours all over again: cafés and hotels overflowing, cars careening under household possessions; people besieging the Spanish Consulate for visas; more rumours of threats from the German Air Force; more stories of the imminence of German tank and motor-cycle units; more people angry, confused and dejected. We learned that the Cabinet was still discussing the question as to whether France should capitulate or carry on the war from North Africa. Reynaud, Mandel, Marin, Monnet and Delbos were said to be in favour of continuing the struggle, but the Pétain-Laval group were pressing strongly for surrender. Laval’s dark sinister face was very much in evidence at the Hotel Splendide restaurant; you saw him with a group of friends, head bent over the table, arguing and gesticulating vehemently. Knickerbocker went up to talk to him and in the course of the conversation said: “Whatever you do, don’t surrender. If you go on fighting, I’m sure America will put her full weight behind you and in the end you’ll win. But if you give in now, you’re finished.”
Laval smiled. “Perhaps,” he said. “But I’m not sure. You see, I don’t think France is Germany’s primary object. I think her real aim is Soviet Russia.” This, at a moment when the German Army was streaming through France, when towns were being bombed and people were fleeing in confusion from one end of the country to the other.
Laval was not the only one: a good many other Frenchmen, mostly Right Wing reactionaries, reasoned along the same lines. When I returned to England from Italy, four days after the German invasion had begun, I talked to a Frenchman who was a member of the French Economic Mission in London. Already he was pessimistic about France’s chances of victory. “In a few weeks,” he said, “France will be faced with the most difficult decision in her history. She will have the choice of either being completely annihilated by the Germans or making a peace that will reduce her to a third-class Power.” It was the first time I’d heard peace mentioned; I remember how astonished I was. “But you wouldn’t even be a third-class Power,” I said. “You would be just a German province.” “Oh no,” he replied, “you cannot destroy France. England yes, but not France. There will always be a bloc of French people on the continent, and one day they will rise again and regain their old power just as the Germans have.”
At the time I was so alarmed by this conversation that I repeated it to a friend in the Foreign Office. He attached little importance to it, believing such sentiments were held by only a small and inconsiderable group of chronic defeatists. But it was the same brand of reasoning that was gaining ground in Bordeaux that Sunday. “Cut your losses and drive the best bargain you can”; that was how the Peace Party pleaded for surrender. In a desperate effort to persuade the French Government to continue its resistance, whether from France itself, or her overseas Empire, the British Government offered to conclude an act of union between the two countries. A draft was sent to the French Government by the British Ambassador that fateful Sunday afternoon. This is what it said:
“At this most fateful moment in the history of the modern world, the Government of the United Kingdom and the French Republic make this declaration of indissoluble union and unyielding resolution in their common defence of justice and freedom against subjection to a system which reduces mankind to a life of robots and slaves.
The two Governments declare that France and Great Britain shall no longer be two, but one Franco-British Union. The Constitution of the Union will provide for joint organs of defence, foreign, financial, and economic policies. Every citizen of France will enjoy immediately citizenship of Great Britain. Every British subject will become a citizen of France.
Both countries will share responsibility for the repair of the devastation of war wherever it occurs in their territories, and the resources of both shall be equally and as one applied to that purpose.
During the war there shall be a single War Cabinet and all the forces of Britain and France, whether on land, sea, or in the air, will be placed under its direction. It will govern from wherever it best can. The two Parliaments will be formally associated.
The nations of the British Empire are already forming new armies. France will keep her available forces in the field, on the sea, and in the air.
The Union appeals to the United States to fortify the economic resources of the Allies and to bring her powerful material aid to the common cause. The Union will concentrate its whole energy against the power of the enemy, no matter where the battle may be, and thus we shall conquer.”
The leaders of France rejected the offer. They had too little faith in their cause, too little faith in the Third Republic. That night it was left to M. Mandel, a staunch and bitter anti-Nazi, to announce to half a dozen journalists in a drab and dingy room at the Prefecture that Reynaud had resigned and that Pétain was the new Prime Minister—the peace Prime Minister. I will never forget him standing there, small and white, his head high and his voice firm, speaking the words he had fought against speaking to the end—words that sounded the death-knell of France. As he was known to be unswervingly anti-capitulation, one of the French journalists asked him if he had made any plans to leave. “Oh no, I shall remain here.” Then he added with an ironical smile, “I’m just beginning to know Bordeaux a little.” (The following day Mandel was arrested as the leader of the “pro-revolt” Party, but at the insistence of Herriot and President Lebrun was soon released. He demanded a written apology from Marshal Pétain and gossip had it that not satisfied with the old man’s first draft he said severely: “This won’t do at all. I will dictate a proper letter of apology,” to which the Marshal acceded, writing down the profuse and abject sentences which were given him.)
What had happened to the tough spirit of France? What had caused this complete and utter moral collapse? Innumerable and conflicting explanations have been given: I leave it to the experts. But of one thing I am sure: that if the French people had had leaders of conviction and integrity, the débâcle would never have happened. Reynaud, a sincere and accurate prophet, lacked the strong personality necessary to grip the popular imagination. His weakness became apparent when he finally threw in his hand and knuckled under to Pétain. Would Churchill have resigned? If the leaders had not lost faith in their cause, the people would not have lost faith in their leaders. German tanks might have penetrated the country’s defences, but Paris would have been defended street by street; towns might have been bombed but there would have been no flow of hysterical refugees to spread despair like a contagious disease; the Government might have been forced abroad, but the French Fleet would be fighting at England’s side now.
Instead, the people of France were betrayed and deserted. News was denied them and directions withheld from them. I think Gordon Waterfield, in his book What Happened to France, has summed it up in the following paragraph:
“It can be shown, I consider, that those who led France in her hour of trial bear nine-tenths of the responsibility … The Government kept on repeating that they would hold out to the last. ‘Paris,’ they said, ‘is in a state of defence,’ and a few days later they declared it an open town. ‘We will fight from North Africa if necessary,’ they proclaimed, and a short time afterwards they asked for the German terms. ‘We will not,’ they said, ‘accept a dishonourable armistice,’ and they gave Hitler a blank cheque. They were not only unfit to lead, but they deceived the people. It is the prosecutors of the Riom trial who should be in the dock.”
* * *
We left for England on the following day on a British cargo boat. We motored to Le Verdon, a port on the mouth of the Gironde, about sixty miles from Bordeaux, where our ship was anchored in the harbour. There was a last-minute scramble among the journalists to get rid of their francs: everyone hurried down to the shops to buy whatever they could, most of them coming back with bottles of perfume to take home to their girl friends.
The change of Government was announced briefly in the morning papers, but the average French person hadn’t yet grasped what it meant. It wasn’t until midday that Pétain broadcast that France was asking the Germans for an armistice. Eddie Ward, Knickerbocker, Ed Angly and I were sitting at a small quayside café at the Pointe de Grave, a mile or so from Le Verdon. It was a wonderful day. Before us a hundred ships lay at anchor in the harbour; the white sand glistened in the sunshine, and the tall pine trees looked like splendid sentinels. Our waitress, a plump, smiling girl, filled up our wineglasses and took our order. A radio was turned on in the kitchen. Suddenly she heard Pétain’s voice saying: “It is with a heavy heart I say we must cease the fight. I have applied to our opponent to ask him if he is ready to sign with us, as between soldiers after the fight and in honour, a means to put an end to hostilities …” She came back in the room with tears streaming down her face, gasping: “We can’t live under the Boches. We can’t. It is not possible.” Ed Angly tried to comfort her, but for the rest of the meal she served us red-eyed and sobbing.
The tender didn’t appear until four that afternoon. At the last moment someone announced that no one was allowed more than one piece of luggage; there was a frantic commotion while people tried to decide what was most important. When we finally left the quay was littered with discarded hampers, bags and boxes—not to mention a long string of motor-cars that had to be abandoned. Among them were Tom Healy’s valiant Chrysler, Gordon’s Ford and Eddie’s Citroen.
We lay in the harbour for over twenty-four hours. Every hour tenders steamed out toward us bringing more passengers until, finally, our small nine-thousand-ton cargo ship, the s.s. Madura, which normally carried a hundred and eighty passengers, was packed with over sixteen hundred people—the normal complement of the Queen Mary. There were bankers, officials, cabinet ministers, wives, children, soldiers, nurses, business men, invalid ladies, retired colonels, maiden aunts, and fifty or sixty journalists. Although most of the passengers were English, there were several hundred French people: many of them climbed on board weeping convulsively at the parting from their relatives and the uncertainty as to whether they would ever see their native land again. There in the harbour, with the sun streaming down and the peaceful outline of the French coast in the distance, it was hard to realize that France had come to an end.
Most people, however, had little time to meditate as to what it meant, for the immediate concern was to find a place to sleep: all the berths, tables and deck chairs had long since been snatched up. Everyone began hurriedly staking out claims on the decks and in the passage-ways. Soon it was so crowded there wasn’t an inch of available space. Mr. Comert, the French Foreign Press Chief, made himself a bed on top of the ping-pong table. On the lower decks there was a detachment of Marines to keep order among the lascar crew (who were apt to panic in the event of danger); a group of marine artillery being transferred from Africa; thirty or forty nurses and ambulance drivers; and a number of wounded British soldiers.
The ship was so overcrowded that if it had been hit few would have survived. It was difficult to decide where to sleep, for although it was preferable below in case of bombs, it was wiser above in case of torpedoes. Eddie, Gordon Waterfield and I flipped a coin and put our blankets down on the top deck; soon afterwards we doubted the shrewdness of our move, for a German bomber dived out of the clouds and made a hit-and-run attempt at the harbour. Our ship was armed and the guns in the stern burst into a loud rattle. We saw bombs fall in the distance and watched the water shoot up like a geyser. Then three French fighters roared overhead and we heard later that the German had been brought down. I don’t know whether the events of the past few days had dulled everyone’s sensibilities, but while all this was going on people were so indifferent that some of them actually sat in their deck chairs reading novels as calmly as though they were on a South Sea cruise. Later that night, while we were still at anchor, we had another raid warning but heard no bombs, and a few minutes later the “all clear” sounded. The next day the German radio claimed we had been sunk.
We pulled out from Le Veron on the afternoon of June 18th. We travelled on a parallel course only a few hundred yards from another refugee cargo ship and were escorted by a destroyer, a small but comforting speck in the distance. The Captain called for volunteers to stand look-out watches for submarines, and most of the journalists signed up. Each stood watch for an hour at a time, but the only excitement any of them had was when Bill Stoneman of the Chicago Daily News spied a small fleet of Spanish fishing boats. Other than that all was quiet and the Captain told us the only occasion any shooting had been done was when they made a mistake and blew a whale to pieces off the West Coast of Africa.
The original passengers of our ship had had a tiring journey, to say the least. They were lost in the flow of refugees—none of us discovered which they were—but we were told they had boarded the vessel in East Africa for a two weeks’ trip to England and had now been on it nearly two months. When they reached Suez, the Mediterranean was suddenly closed to British shipping and they were forced to go all the way back to Cape Town. They remained in port a week while the ship was “degaussed” against magnetic mines, then started once more on their journey. As they neared the English Channel they received an S O S to put in at Bordeaux and take off the refugees.
Although the Captain had been able to take on no extra rations since Cape Town, the chef managed to provide all sixteen hundred passengers with two meals a day; for breakfast a cup of tea and a slice of bread, and for dinner a piece of meat, some rice and a potato. The native crew had a more substantial ration and were only too pleased to share some of it with Knickerbocker and Ed Angly in exchange for a handsome shower of silver. We had a little food left over from our Tours-Bordeaux trip—none of it very practical—but plenty of caviare and pâté de foie gras which we devoured hungrily for breakfast.
During the thirty-six-hour journey news was picked up spasmodically over the radio, typed out by one of the journalists, and pinned to the billboard. All kinds of rumours swept the ship concerning the German demands and the French replies. But the one question that was on everybody’s lips was the fate of the French Navy. The French passengers were vehement about this. “They must never surrender it to the Germans; if they cannot turn it over to Great Britain, they must scuttle it first.”
But whatever happened, one thing was sure: England was fighting on. On the same afternoon that our ship was sailing out of the harbour of Le Verdon, and the coast of France was fading away in the distance, Mr. Churchill was saying in the House of Commons:
“What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us, therefore, brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say: ‘This was their finest hour.’”
Yes, England was fighting on and the people of England were already embarking on ‘their finest hour’ with that mild and unshakable imperturbability so characteristic of them. When we disembarked at Falmouth, a group of motherly, middle-aged women brought us lemonade and sandwiches, fussing over us, saying what a hard time we must have had. “Now you’re safely back in England,” said one, “everything will be all right.”
Yes, England was another world. A second woman volunteer handed me an emigration card, stamped “Refugee”.
I protested: “I’m not a refugee. I’m an American journalist.”
“Everyone,” she said firmly, “who is not English, is a refugee.”
I nodded. I signed the card. I asked her what she thought of things.
“Improving, on the whole. At least, there’s no one left to let us down.”
She said it not sarcastically, or bitterly, or reproachfully; but in a bright, rather pleased tone of voice.
Thank God for that maddening English insularity, I thought.