CHAPTER 3
Into the Abyss
With vacations but a memory, shoppers filled the streets of Paris as September 1939 began, readying themselves for a new season of work and school. Premier Daladier called the nation’s politicians back to the National Assembly, and on Saturday, September 2, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate voted to spend 70 billion francs on war preparations. “Our duty is to finish with aggression and violence,” Daladier asserted. But he insisted the vote was not a declaration of war, promising he would “come back” to the Assemby if this became necessary.* On the same day, de Gaulle was appointed to command of the tank regiments of the 5th Army — five battalions scattered behind the Maginot Line. Across the Channel, a worried British Parliament also was sitting. Nervous exchanges passed between the two foreign offices; London feared the French would drag their heels in following through with the consequences of their ultimatum to Berlin:
Unless the German government are prepared to give the French government satisfactory assurances that the German government have suspended all aggressive action against Poland and are prepared to withdraw their forces from Polish territory, the French government will without hesitation fulfill their obligation to Poland.
On Sunday, with Adolf Hitler refusing to pull back the squadrons he had thrown into Poland, time ran out. The British ultimatum expired at 11 a.m. and the French one at 5 p.m. Premier Daladier signed the declaration of war on Germany a few hours after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, speaking for Great Britain, had sadly told the world “this country is at war with Germany.” Britain and France had kept their promise to Poland to defend it from any enemy.
Neither country did much to immediately confront the German aggression; the French army made a feeble foray into the Saar before withdrawing, while British officials argued against air attacks on German cities lest the Luftwaffe retaliate in kind. General Gamelin, surveying the French forces at his command, gave himself to bizarre comments that led German war planners to conclude France had no real game plan to follow through on its threats. At first, he said the best service France could render Poland would be to mass its army on the German frontier, thereby forcing Hitler to keep divisions on the Rhine that could not be used against the Poles. To Pierre-Étienne Flandin, the one-time foreign minister who opposed the war and supported Marshall Pétain, Gamelin proposed to play a different card. “The Poles will hold out at least six months and we will come to their aid by way of Romania.”[1] How French troops would get to that Black Sea country — unless via the Mediterranean and through the Dardanelles — was not explained.
Watching the drama unfold from his post with the 5th Army, Colonel de Gaulle struggled to build a tank force with the strength to launch offensive action. France did not have a single armoured division and de Gaulle’s orders required him to disperse his tanks among various infantry divisions rather than, as he wished, assemble them together. On September 12, he led one battalion on a small raid on a German frontier post opposite the Maginot Line. President Lebrun told him on a visit, “I am acquainted with your ideas, but it does seem too late for the enemy to apply them.”[2] In frustration, de Gaulle wrote his first wartime letter to Paul Reynaud, still minister of finance. “When the enemy thinks we are weary, confused and dissatisfied,” de Gaulle wrote, he “will take the offensive against us.”[3] Years later, he would observe in his Mémoires de guerre that it was “without astonishment” that he watched the French army “settle down into stagnation.”[4]
Polish defences crumbled even before the Soviet Union, shielded by the non-aggression pact Josef Stalin had entered into with Hitler, joined the attack on September 17. Within five weeks, Poland had become a mere vassal state of the German Reich after being swallowed up by its two historic adversaries. The Daladier government did nothing to assist Poland, but it moved speedily to wage war on another front — against its domestic Communists. Decrees against the Communist Party, resulting in the arrest without charges of both deputies and party members, were yet another violation of the French constitution, crafted as the politicians connived to advance their own positions, rather than that of their country.
The French public, mindful of the immense losses of the First World War, resented the mobilization of men who might suffer similar slaughter. In this, public opinion was largely at one with the High Command. France had lost 1.5 million men between 1914 and 1918, with more than four million injured. Even the most intractable devotees of classical warfare were unwilling to throw another generation of men into the death traps their fathers had endured. It was partly this revulsion against the repetition of needless deaths that induced French commanders to put their faith in a policy of static defence, one symbolized by the fixed fortifications of the Maginot Line.
What the British called the phony war and the French termed the drôle de guerre dragged through the winter of 1939–40, immersing France in a cocoon of complacency. “NOËL! NOËL!” ran a headline on the front page of the popular daily Le Petit Parisien on Christmas Eve. “PARIS optimiste et de bonne humeur.”[5] Colonel de Gaulle took leave from his command in Alsace to join Yvonne and Anne in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. Philippe and Elizabeth came down from school in Paris. Yvonne cooked a Christmas Eve dinner and Charles poured hot water on their backyard birdbath to melt the ice. After, the family tramped a kilometre along a snowy road to attend midnight mass at the village church, Notre Dame de l’Assomption (Our Lady of Assumption).[6] During these few days of quiet respite, de Gaulle had time to ponder the direction of the war while reflecting on his own future.
Early in the New Year, de Gaulle received an invitation to a dinner in Paris. It came from his loyal supporter, Paul Reynaud, inviting him to Reynaud’s flat in the rue de Rivoli. Their friendship had strengthened despite the failure of the politician to gain government backing for de Gaulle’s military ideas. Léon Blum, premier during the Popular Front’s time in government, was there that evening and he remembered de Gaulle’s remarks as they walked back to the quai de Bourbon:
I am playing my part in a horrible deception. The few dozen light tanks attached to my command are no more than trifles. I am afraid that the lesson of Poland, clear though it is, has been rejected as so much prejudice. Believe me, on our side everything is yet to be done. If we do not act in time we shall lose this war most wretchedly.[7]
The problems facing France, de Gaulle believed, lay more with the country’s political leadership than with its military chiefs. The politicians might be good men individually, he would later write, “but the political game consumed them and paralyzed them.”[8]
Fate also played tricks at the most inopportune times. In January, Premier Daladier, riding a horse in the forest of Rambouillet, traditional country home of French leaders, fell and broke his ankle. The pain he suffered from the mechanical therapy imposed by his doctors forced thoughts of the war from his mind.
In the same month, de Gaulle finished work on the latest of his carefully prepared critiques of France’s military strategy. He titled it L’avénement de la force mécanique (The Advent of Mechanized Forces) and sent off copies, printed on a mimeograph machine, to Daladier and eighty members of the government and the High Command. It was yet another call for France to recognize the consequences of the revolution in military technology. Only if it did so would it be ready to deal with “breakthroughs and pursuits the scale of which will infinitely exceed those of the most lightning events of the past.” De Gaulle’s warning, as usual, went unheeded. “My memorandum produced no shock,” he would remember.[9]
When the Soviet Union attacked neighbouring Finland in the “winter war” of 1939–40, a wave of sympathy built up in France and Britain for the courageous little nation fighting a Communist behemoth. Plans were hatched at a Paris meeting of the British-French Supreme War Council to bomb Russian oil fields and to send thirty thousand “volunteers” to Finland. It was too late. Finland capitulated in March. The flailing of the Daladier government finally exhausted the patience of the National Assembly. On March 21, Daladier and his Radical-Socialist Party were forced to resign and two days later Paul Reynaud was called on to become premier.
There was a peculiarly French dimension to the rivalry between these two men, but both were careful in their respect of public morality. Reynaud had taken a mistress, the Countess de Portes, only after separating from his wife. Daladier had acquired his mistress, the Marquise de Crussol, only after his wife had died. Both women were from wealthy bourgeois families. The marquise, like Mme de Portes, was the estranged wife of a notable man. Born Jeanne Beziers, daughter of a sardine tycoon, she was described by author André Maurois as “a graceful and beautiful woman, blonde and youthful … with a taste for power.” The two women became bitter rivals as each sought to promote the careers of their paramours. According to André Géraud, who wrote under the pen name Pertinax, “From morning to night the two furies spied on and pursued each other. This quarrel became a public performance. If he went out with one, Reynaud had to fear the other would show up.”
Reynaud had made a good deal of money in his law practice in the Basse-Alpes and he now sat in the National Assembly for the well-off Bourse district in Paris. His first speech as premier would have to summon both the Chamber and the country to a common purpose: to win the war. He called on de Gaulle to help write it. The speech was brief, but powerful. The new government had but one aim: “to arouse, reassemble, and direct all the sources of French energy to fight and to conquer.”
De Gaulle watched from the gallery, but he found the scene “appalling.” There was no appreciation of “the danger in which the country stood” and the deputies could speak only of “claims and complaints.”[10] Most members of Reynaud’s party, the Democratic Republican Alliance, abstained on the motion to confirm him as premier and it passed by only one vote. The president of the Chamber, Édouard Herriot told de Gaulle, “I’m not very sure it had that.”
In order to preserve his slender hold on power, Reynaud had to accept Daladier as minister of defense, a move that for a time kept de Gaulle out of the Cabinet. “If de Gaulle comes here, I shall leave,” Daladier had told a messenger from Reynaud. In the face of such opposition, de Gaulle felt he had no choice but to reject an invitation to become secretary of the War Cabinet.
A movement to undermine Reynaud began soon after. In a demonstration of the political gamesmanship that preoccupied Paris, thousands of copies of a four-page pamphlet were distributed carrying pictures of Marshall Pétain, hailing the old warrior: “Yesterday a great soldier. Today a great diplomat. Tomorrow?”
When German troops marched into Denmark and Norway on April 8, de Gaulle found himself the recipient of an invitation to a private meeting with General Gamelin. It took place at the commander-in-chief’s headquarters in the massive Château de Vincennes in the eastern suburbs of Paris. The general had distanced himself from his senior staff at Château de Montry and the setting reminded de Gaulle of a convent with Gamelin immersed in an “ivory tower.”[11] Others referred to the Vincennes command post as “a submarine without a periscope.” There was not a single radio in the headquarters and when an officer suggested a teletype link be set up, he was told that “military orders cannot be compared to horse race results.” De Gaulle may have reflected on how Premier Reynaud had learned of the Norway invasion not from the general but in a phone call from the Reuters news service. The premier had telephoned the commander-in-chief for confirmation. “I hope,” he had said, “that you have prepared a thundering riposte.”[12] But Gamelin knew nothing of the German action. He was not, however, entirely immune to the realities of mechanized warfare. When the novelist Jules Romains visited Gamelin in December 1939, the general talked uninterruptedly for an hour about the direction of the war. It will be different than last time, he said. “Apparent immobility will lead suddenly to an operation in which total power will be used at once … it will be very swift and very horrible.”
In his meeting with Gamelin, de Gaulle learned he was to be put in charge of one of two new armoured divisions that the French army was at last setting up, bringing the total to four. The 4th Armoured Division would be formed from tank units detached from other divisions, and it was a signal honour for a man of the rank of colonel to be given the command. De Gaulle must have experienced a rush of pride at the news.
The long-awaited blow that de Gaulle had warned would come when France was “weary, confused, and dissatisfied” finally fell on May 10. Having subdued Denmark and Norway in barely more than a fortnight — despite the presence of expeditionary forces sent to the Norwegian coast by both the British and French — Hitler threw eighty divisions across the frontiers of Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The Luftwaffe’s Stuka dive bombers led the attack with raids on railways and road junctions, spreading confusion and fear among soldiers and civilians. By striking through neutral countries, German forces were able to outflank France’s heavily fortified Maginot Line overlooking the Rhine River. The strategy defied all French expectations that the German army would never drive a wedge through the Ardennes Forest and into France; the High Command assumed that tanks and heavy equipment would be unable to navigate its narrow roads. A French pilot, flying reconnaissance the night the Germans drove into the Ardennes, reported seeing long convoys of military vehicles with their headlights blacked out. His report was met with “complete skepticism.” Too late, it was realized the panzers would have been easy targets had the French chosen to hit them on those dusty trails.
In three days, ten armoured and six motorized divisions — the dreaded panzers — commanded by General der Panzertruppe Heinz Wilhelm Guderian, swept through the Belgian Ardennes, penetrated French territory, and crossed the Meuse River to capture the historic fortress town of Sedan. It fell after a massive aerial attack turned the Sedan valley into a smoking cauldron. German soldiers watching the attack from the north bank of the Meuse were as shocked as the French defenders caught in the devastation. When General Alphonse Georges, the French commander in the northeast region, received news of the town’s fall he threw himself into a chair and burst into tears. “Our front has broken at Sedan … there has been a collapse.” By May 15, when de Gaulle was put in command of the French 4th Armoured Division, German troops had swung north and were well on their way to the English Channel. Eight hundred thousand French and British troops were in retreat.
While preparing to take over his new command, de Gaulle found time to write to his wife in Colombey. Addressing Yvonne as “my dear little darling wife,” he told her to “be very careful to take shelter by day if there is an alert and to turn out the lights at night.” Later, he grew more worried and wrote again to advise her to move to her sister’s place near Orléans. The owner of the village garage, M. Gadot, could drive her there, he said. In another letter, written “at the end of a long and hard fight which went very well for me,” de Gaulle told Yvonne he had been promoted to brigadier general. He concluded: “If the general atmosphere is bad, it is excellent for your husband.”[13]
Amid the turmoil, de Gaulle was anxious to see his son, Philippe. He’d had good reports of his studies at Collège Stanislas, the private Catholic school on Notre-Dame-des-Champs that de Gaulle had attended and where his father had been a teacher. Philippe, an eighteen-year-old with dreams of some day going to sea, would have been surprised when a car arrived at the school to take him to Château Montry, the French army headquarters.[14] It was actually a military vehicle and its driver was dressed in civilian clothes, a charade to make him look like a taxi driver. When Philippe entered the office where he was to meet his father, he found the maps on the wall had been carefully covered. He took it as a bad sign, thinking that if things were going well there would have been no need to cover up the army’s movements. He stared at his father, later recalling his “severity and solemnity” as signs “of a man knowing he is not sure to see his son again for a long time.” Philippe had always thought his father “had a different dimension” than others, not because of his “exceptional size, but due to his personality.” At home, he learned at an early age that his father maintained his authority in a “quiet way” — it was enough for him to “send a little warning shot” from time to time.[15]
De Gaulle told Philippe that he and his sister should head for Orléans in order to meet up with their mother and Anne who were on their way from Colombey. “But,” Philippe asked, “Elisabeth is about to sit for her baccalauréat [university entrance examination] — must we leave before she could do that?”
“Yes,” de Gaulle nodded, whispering, “The situation is very serious. Be prepared to leave Paris without delay.”
He gave Philippe two thousand francs which the boy saw as “a huge sum for me.” The next morning de Gaulle left for the front.
De Gaulle’s orders for the 4th Armoured Division were to gather up his forces and position them in the region of Laon, 120 kilometres northeast of Paris, and harass the flank of the German army driving to the English Channel. His small command would be reinforced, he was told, with units of the 6th Army that was being mustered in the east of France. When he got to Vesinet, the command post assigned him by General Georges, de Gaulle learned his new division existed only on paper; its scattered units had yet to be drawn together from other commands.
“Here you are, de Gaulle,” General Georges proclaimed. “For you who have so long held the ideas which the enemy is putting into practice, here is the chance to act!”[16]
Act de Gaulle would, but first he had to organize the few tank units that were gathering south of Laon. He received a battalion of heavy Char B tanks and two battalions of light Renault tanks, but no infantry, no artillery, no air support, and no anti-aircraft cover. De Gaulle assessed the situation in Laon, already threatened by the flank of Guderian’s panzers driving toward the Channel. He chose not to set up his headquarters within sight of the medieval, walled citadel that sat atop the narrow ridge that bisected the town — and held the historic Cathedral of Notre-Dame, begun in the 12th century — but in the village of Bruyères, on the open Picardy plain a few miles to the southeast. He toured his surroundings, noting the layout of the farm country that made it suitable for tank operations, and collected additional scattered units of artillery and cavalry.
At daybreak on May 17, still without major artillery or anti-aircraft guns, de Gaulle gathered up two hundred tanks and set off to attack the Germans holding Montcornet, where a Wehrmacht supply column was assembling fuel and food for the final assault on the Channel ports. De Gaulle was eager to carry out his mission; a successful counterattack would go a long way toward overcoming the spirit of defeat hanging over the French army.
By late afternoon, joined by two infantry regiments, de Gaulle’s force was in the outskirts of the town and perilously close to seizing the headquarters of General Guderian. Several hundred Germans had been killed and 130 captured, with French casualties of “less than two hundred men.”[17] Guderian would later write that “a few of his [de Gaulle’s] tanks succeeded in penetrating to within a mile of my advanced headquarters in Holnon wood.”
De Gaulle, under pressure from Stuka dive bombers and knowing his small force was vulnerable to a determined counterattack, withdrew before nightfall. “We were lost children,” he would write of this engagement.[18]
That night, de Gaulle scrawled a note in pencil and handed it to his liaison officer, Captain Leton, with instructions to take it to General Robert Touchon at the headquarters of the 6th Army at Moussy. It was a request for reinforcements and Leton thought it had “an urgent tone, almost pleading.”
When he delivered the note at midnight he found Touchon in his pajamas. The general called in a support officer who looked doubtfully at the message. “With what we have, we can’t promise anything,” he said.[19]
De Gaulle was on the move again the next morning, driving north from Laon with the support of additional artillery and tank regiments. After recapturing several towns and reaching the banks of the Serre River, the offensive bogged down in the face of a heavy German counterattack. General Georges ordered a withdrawal, and de Gaulle moved back south of Laon. A French radio crew interviewed de Gaulle and invited him to record his comments on the battle. He told listeners that France was caught up in mechanized warfare and while the enemy had gained an initial advantage, victory would come one day from “our armoured divisions and our attacks in the air.” It was his first known radio broadcast and he used it to try to rally the country to fight on. He also understood the need to claim his own place in the victory that he was sure would one day belong to France: “The leader who speaks to you has the honour to command a French armoured division. This division has had a hard fight, and we can say very directly, very seriously — without any bragging — that we have dominated the battlefield from the first to the last hour of battle.”[20]
For the next week the 4th Armoured Division careered about the countryside, finally receiving on May 26 the order to move west to Abbeville, the latest trophy to fall into General Guderian’s hands. French journalist Jean-Raymond Tournoux recorded the impressions of one of de Gaulle’s division officers. “He never tired, and you saw him everywhere — that leather jacket, his casque and the inevitable cigarette. He was not an easy man to be with, was aloof and serious.… He was tough, ruthless, inhuman, letting nothing and nobody count except the battle.”[21]
In a night attack, de Gaulle moved on the German positions south of Abbeville, a Somme River port twenty-two kilometres from the English Channel. The first objective, Mont Caubet, was taken quickly. De Gaulle would recall how “an atmosphere of victory hung over the field. The wounded were smiling. The guns fired gaily. Before us, in a pitched battle, the Germans had retired.”[22] Soon, however, reinforcements stiffened the German lines. De Gaulle lost nearly half his tanks, either to enemy fire or to the quagmire of nearby swamps. According to British historian Kenneth Macksey, de Gaulle’s efforts caused “hardly a twitter of alarm on the German side.” On May 25, Paris newspapers carried reports that Colonel de Gaulle was missing in action; and on May 30, the 4th Division was relieved by the newly arrived 51st Scottish Division. In subsequent fighting, most of that division was captured along with its commander, General Victor Fortune. Their defeat spelled the end of effective Allied resistance in France. But de Gaulle, by now growing accustomed to his new rank of brigadier general (a conditional appointment that would never be officially confirmed), had become the only French commander to force the Germans to retreat — fourteen kilometres in front of Abbeville — during the Battle of France.
It would later be established that contrary to popular belief, Allied and German forces were more or less evenly matched. General Gamelin estimated Allied strength at 144 divisions and the Germans at 140 divisions. However, much of the French army was tied down on the Maginot Line, rendering those units unavailable for offensive action. Even in tanks, the French were almost the equal in numbers — some 2,300 to around 2,600 for the Germans — and most were more heavily armed than the bulk of the German machines. Only in the air did the Germans have clear superiority.[23]
By the end of May, it became clear to de Gaulle that despite the approximate equality of forces “the battle was virtually lost.” King Albert of Belgium had capitulated. Three hundred and fifty thousand troops of the British Expeditionary Force and the French 1st Army were encircled at Dunkirk. Most would be evacuated by a flotilla of navy vessels and small civilian boats after Hitler, fearing his forces were in danger of outrunning their supply lines, ordered a halt to their advance.
Despite this retreat, a ray of hope did emerge from Britain at this time. The country had a new prime minister, Winston Churchill, who was promising his countrymen “nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender, and even if … this Island were subjugated … then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the Old.[24]
This change seemed to guarantee that France would be able to count on British resolve in its fight. However, the present situation remained a very difficult one, and de Gaulle desperately wanted to ensure that all that could be done to save the country was being done.
In a letter to Premier Reynaud on June 1, de Gaulle let his frustration be known. The defeats suffered by France are due to “the enemy’s application of ideas conceived by me and from our High Command’s refusal to apply the same conceptions.” If he could not serve in the Cabinet, at least he should be put in charge of “all the armoured corps” of the French army. “I alone am capable of commanding this corps.” Further, de Gaulle argued, Reynaud must not abandon the country to “the men of former times.” They are the ones who have brought France to “the edge of the abyss.”[25]
Four days later, de Gaulle was handed a telegram from Paris. Premier Reynaud wanted him in the government. The commander of the 7th Army, General Aubert Frère, had heard of the order before it reached de Gaulle and hastened to offer his congratulations. “Rumour has it that you’re to be Minister,” he said. “It’s certainly late in the day for a cure. Ah, at least let’s save our honour!”[26]
De Gaulle hurried to Paris. He found the premier in a reflective mood but anxious to explain why he had brought back General Weygand and recruited Marshall Pétain. “It’s better,” he said, “to have him [Pétain] inside than out.” De Gaulle insisted that if the Battle of France had been lost, the war could yet be won. France would fight on from its overseas possessions, but transport would be needed to evacuate men and equipment from Metropolitan France. Reynaud told de Gaulle to go to London and ask the help of Winston Churchill in supplying ships to move French forces to North Africa.
Before leaving for London, de Gaulle had one last visit with his son, over dinner in the ornate dining room of the Hôtel Lutetia on Boulevard Raspail. After telling Philippe of his promotion to the rank of brigadier general, de Gaulle repeated his instructions for him to go with his sister to the home of their aunt, Suzanne Rérolle, in Rebréchien, a village twenty kilometres from Orléans. By now, de Gaulle hoped, his wife would have found her way there with little Anne and her governess, Marguerite Potel. The next morning, Philippe tried to fight his way through the crowds clamouring for train tickets, first at the Gare d’Orsay and then at Gare d’Austerlitz. He found police blocking the doors to both stations. Hearing this, de Gaulle acted. He arranged for a “taxi” — probably the car and driver he’d used before — and had Philippe collect Elisabeth from her convent school, Notre-Dame-de-Sion in suburban Bondoufle. They drove south to Rebréchien, reaching there on Monday, the day before de Gaulle’s arrival in Orléans. Philippe and Elisabeth found their mother already at their aunt’s home.
They stayed in Rebréchien only a few hours. After releasing their driver, Philippe told his mother of the instructions his father had given him before leaving Paris. They were to return to the north, to the seacoast village of Carantec in Britanny, where de Gaulle had rented the upper two floors of a villa. No explanation for this trip is given in the memoirs of either Charles or Philippe de Gaulle. De Gaulle must have made up his mind to get his family to England as soon as possible. They set out for Britanny in Suzanne’s husband’s car, a small black Mathis barely large enough to hold the five adults, one disabled girl, and Suzanne’s two children. Suzanne had no driver’s licence and was not used to driving. In the absence of her husband, who was in the army, she had no choice but to take the wheel. Philippe, hunched up on the floor, decided to try his luck by train. He left the car at the railway station in Orléans and made his way north on local trains. A bus deposited him in Carantec on the night of June 13, where he found his family already installed at the villa.[27]
On Sunday, June 9, the morning after his dinner with Philippe, de Gaulle rose early and was taken by staff car to Le Bourget airport where he boarded an air force plane for his flight to London. With him was Premier Reynaud’s chef de cabinet, Roland de Margerie who carried a letter of introduction to Winston Churchill, and de Gaulle’s aide, Geoffroy de Courcel. The visit gave de Courcel — a blond-haired, apple-cheeked young man — the opportunity to demonstrate his impeccable English. That had been one of the reasons de Gaulle, who knew very little of the language, had taken him on.
To de Gaulle, the English capital was tranquil with “the streets and parks full of people peacefully out for a walk.”[28] They lunched at the French Embassy and that afternoon de Gaulle saw Churchill at No. 10 Downing Street. This first meeting was a test for both men; they needed to measure each other’s personality and gain an understanding of what was important to the other. Churchill bobbed up from his chair, paced the floor, and, cigar in hand, declaimed in high-school French that both countries must hang on; support from the British Dominions and the United States would eventually turn the tide.
De Gaulle had heard much of this energetic and unpredictable British figure. He knew Churchill was a friend of Reynaud, and he recalled the time the premier had told him that Churchill had flown to Paris in 1938 to urge him to remain in the French Cabinet. Reynaud quit anyway, in disgust with the Munich pact. At this first meeting with Churchill, it is likely de Gaulle did not entirely trust the prime minister. Raised in an atmosphere of historic antipathy toward England and knowing little of the country in which he now found himself, de Gaulle would have seen Churchill as a representative of a race that many Frenchmen felt had let France down in the past. On a personal level, we can understand that he would have found it hard to forget that “a young lady who was almost his fiancée” had been killed by British shelling of Lille in 1917.[29]
Churchill, in contrast, knew France intimately and loved everything about the country across the Channel, a place that offered exciting diversions from the often stultifying life he lived at home. Here an Englishman could feel free to be himself in a way he never could among his own people. It was in France that Churchill likely cultivated his taste for cognac and champagne, but he had never forgotten his first visit as a nine-year-old in 1883. Firmly etched in his memory was the memorial he had been shown in the Place de la Concorde honouring France’s lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, taken by Prussia in 1870. Churchill became caught up in the study of French history.
From his time as First Lord of the Admiralty in the First World War to his political isolation in the interwar years and his return to power in May 1940 — “Winnie is back!” flashed the Admiralty message system — he was often in France, whether at the trenches during the war or in private conversations with leaders such as Paul Reynaud. Churchill would remember being told of the writings of a young Colonel de Gaulle, a man much taken with “the offensive power of modern armed vehicles.” He hadn’t put much stock in de Gaulle’s arguments, convinced as he was that France in the 1930s possessed “the finest, though not the largest, army in existence at the present time.” By now, Churchill had thrown that opinion out the window. On June 5, the day de Gaulle had been called into Reynaud’s Cabinet, Churchill had written to Mackenzie King, the prime minister of Canada, to warn: “I do not know whether it will be possible to keep France in the war.”[30]
Now, Churchill and de Gaulle were meeting as the French army lay virtually prostrate on the field of battle. Churchill, beyond being shocked as de Gaulle would recall, was convinced that France no longer had the spirit and determination to carry on the war. The prime minister made it clear he saw no hope of launching a British counteroffensive in France. When de Gaulle asked Churchill to send the Royal Air Force to French bases south of the Loire, he refused. The last two fighter squadrons in France had flown back to Britain the night before, where they would be held to protect England. Churchill promised to dispatch the 1st Canadian Division, the only fully equipped force left in England, across the Channel to reinforce British troops still there. The pledge eased the tension in the room, but did nothing to resolve the unsettled matter of transport to North Africa.
De Gaulle departed knowing he had failed in his mission to bring more British air power into the skies over France. But he had to admit, grudgingly, that Churchill’s decision to retain the RAF in England was the right one for the future of the war. “Great Britain, led by such a fighter, would certainly not flinch,” he thought.[31] Before leaving London, de Gaulle met with Anthony Eden, the British secretary of war. He also saw Jean Monnet, an economist with the French Economic Mission who was in charge of coordinating British-French war purchases. Finally, his visits completed, De Gaulle flew back to France where he landed uneasily at Le Bourget airport in Paris. The plane touched down ony a few hours after a German air raid had left unexploded bombs on the runway.
Standing on the steps of the Préfecture in Orléans on Tuesday morning June 11, de Gaulle may have reflected that much had happened in the past two days to confirm his worst fears. He would have been interrupted in his thoughts by the arrival of a car to drive him north, along with two armoured vehicles assigned as escorts. The road was heavy with refugee traffic coming south, but few vehicles were going north and de Gaulle made good time, reaching Huntziger’s command post at Arcis-sur-Aube by mid-morning. Crossing the Seine River at Troyes, a city familiar to de Gaulle as it was close to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, he may have thought of how a determined guerilla band could hold out against the Germans in the forêt d’orient — the Eastern Forest — that lay between it and Colombey. But his mind was focused on his meeting with Huntziger and on the possibility that General Heinz Guderian, the panzer commander, might be storming south on this very road.
As history would later reveal, de Gaulle and Guderian followed parallel career paths in their commitment to the use of mechanized forces. Guderian’s superiors criticized him for impulsive actions and he was sacked when he disobeyed orders to slow his advance into France. Hitler, not wanting to lose the services of a fervent Nazi who had earned the Führer’s praise by his quick conquest of Poland, insisted on Guderian’s return to duty. The source, however, of much of Guderian’s military expertise came from the books of Charles de Gaulle that he had read, and by emulating the tactics de Gaulle and others had advocated. Even Adolf Hitler admitted he had “learned much” from having had de Gaulle’s books — before they were translated into German — read to him.[32]
To his meeting with Huntziger, de Gaulle brought a straightforward message: “The government sees plainly that the Battle of France is virtually lost, but it means to continue the war by transporting itself to Africa with all the resources that can be got across. The present generalissimo [Weygand] is not the man to carry it out. Would you be the man?”[33]
De Gaulle always insisted that Huntziger’s answer was “Yes.” He then told Huntziger he would be receiving the government’s instructions. Huntziger would later give a different version of the meeting, maintaining he laughed at the offer. In any event, de Gaulle hurriedly finished the meeting and set out to retrace his steps south. Refugees clogging the bridge across the Seine at the village of Mércy, scene of the second-to-last of Napoleon’s great battles — a calamitous loss to the Austrians in 1814 — held up de Gaulle’s “small suite” for an hour. All along the route through Romilly and Sens, he encountered “units retreating southwards, mixed pell-mell with the refugees.” They reminded him of a “shepherdless flock.” Adding to the confusion, a strange fog which many took to be poison gas hung over the countryside.[34]
It was late afternoon by the time de Gaulle reached Briare, where he headed for the Château du Muguet, a residence of minor presence among the great châteaux of the Loire. Weather-worn and ill-maintained, the eighty-year-old stone and lobster-red brick mansion had been assigned to General Weygand and was to serve as the site for that day’s conference with Winston Churchill. One of Churchill’s advisors, General Edward Spears, noted its “ridiculous name” — which he translated as Lily of the Valley Castle — and thought it “a hideous house” to which he took “an instant dislike.”[35] De Gaulle does not record his impression of the place, but had he been asked, he no doubt would have agreed with Spears. It was an aptly ugly location for an ugly business.
* Daladier’s failure to do so furnished ammunition for Pierre Laval and others to claim that going to war without a specific vote of the National Assembly violated the constitution of the Third Republic.