All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945. Max Hastings

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СКАЧАТЬ disasters. Constantin Joffe of the Foreign Legion expressed surprise at the manner in which the Jews of his regiment distinguished themselves:

      Many of them were small tailors or peddlers from Belleville, the workman’s quarter of Paris, or from the ghetto of the Rue du Temple. No one would have anything to do with them at [the training camp of] Barcares…They spoke only Yiddish. They looked as if they were afraid of a machine-gun, they seemed to be in perpetual fear. Yet under fire, if volunteers were needed to fetch back munitions under a heavy shelling or if lines of barbed wire entanglements had to be up at night fairly in front of the enemy guns, these little men were the first to offer their service. They did it quietly without swagger, perhaps without enthusiasm; but they did it. It was always they who, up to the very last moment, brought back our arms from an abandoned post.

      Wehrmacht commanders expressed admiration for the manner in which some French units fought in early June to defend their new line on the Somme. A German diarist wrote: ‘In these ruined villages the French resisted to the last man. Some “hedgehogs” carried on when our infantry was twenty miles behind them.’ But on 6 June the front was decisively breached, and by the 9th von Rundstedt’s tanks were driving into Rouen. Next day, they broke the Aisne line as the French government left Paris; diplomat Jean Chauvel set fire to the chimney of his office in the Quai d’Orsay as he burned a mass of papers in its fireplace, one of many such symbolic bonfires of his nation’s hopes. There were fears that, with the administration gone, socialist workers from the suburbs would march into the capital and proclaim a new Commune. Instead, when so many inhabitants had fled, there was only a macabre tranquillity: on 12 June in a smart Paris street, a Swiss journalist was bemused to meet a herd of abandoned cattle, lowing plaintively. The fall of the capital two days later caused the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, a Jew now in remote exile, to write: ‘Few of my own misfortunes have dismayed me and filled me with despair as much as the humiliation of Paris, a city that was blessed like no other with the ability to make anyone who came there happy.’

      The great flight of civilians west and south continued by day and night. ‘Silently, with no lights on, cars kept coming, one after the other,’ wrote Irène Némirovsky, ‘full to bursting with baggage and furniture, prams and birdcages, packing cases and baskets of clothes, each with a mattress tied firmly to the roof. They looked like mountains of fragile scaffolding and they seemed to move without the aid of a motor, propelled by their own weight.’ Némirovsky described three hapless civilian victims of air attack: ‘Their bodies had been torn to shreds, but by chance their three faces were untouched. Such gloomy, ordinary faces, with a dim, fixed, stunned expression as if they were trying in vain to understand what was happening to them; they weren’t made, my God, to die in a battle, they weren’t made for death.’

      RAF fighter pilot Paul Richey saw a Luftwaffe bomb fall upon four farmworkers as they tilled a field: ‘We found them among the craters. The old man lay face down, his body twisted grotesquely, one leg shattered and a savage gash across the back of his neck, oozing steadily into the earth. His son lay close by…Against the hedge I found what must have been the remains of the third boy – recognizable only by a few tattered rags, a broken boot and some splinters of bone. The five stricken horses lay bleeding beside the smashed harrow, we shot them later. The air was foul with the reek of high explosive.’

      In those days when Europeans were still losing their innocence, British pilots were stunned by the spectacle of Messerschmitts machine-gunning refugees. Richey met a fellow airman in the mess: ‘A disillusioned Johnny almost reluctantly said, “They are shits after all.” From this moment our concept of a chivalrous foe was dead.’ Private Ernie Farrow of the British Army’s 2nd Norfolks likewise recoiled from the carnage wrought by Goering’s knights of the air: ‘All along the road were people who had been killed with no arms, no heads, there was cattle lying about dead, there was little tiny children, there was old people. Not one or two, but hundreds of them lying about…We couldn’t stop to clear the road…so we had to drive our lorries over the top of them, which was heart-breaking – really heart-breaking.’

      At Reynaud’s new refuge of government, the Château de Chissay on the Loire, his mistress Hélène de Portes was seen directing visitors’ cars, clad in a red dressing gown over pyjamas. Her impassioned influence was exercised to persuade the prime minister to agree an armistice. Reynaud wrote sadly later, after Portes’ death in a car crash, that she ‘was led astray by her desire to be in with the young…and to distance herself from Jews and old politicians. But she thought she was helping me.’ Portes’ mood reflected that of much of her nation. At Sully-sur-Loire a woman, red with anger and excitement, shouted at a French officer standing in front of a church: ‘What are you waiting for, you soldiers, to stop this war? Do you want them to massacre us all with our children?…Why are you still fighting? That Reynaud! If I could get hold of him, the scoundrel!’

      At the headquarters of the Wehrmacht, euphoria prevailed. Gen. Eduard Wagner wrote on 15 June: ‘It should really be recorded for the history of our times and of the world how [Wehrmacht chief of staff Franz] Halder sits at the million-scale map and measures off the distances with a metre-rule and already deploys across the Loire. I doubt whether [Gen. Hans von] Seeckt’s synthesis of “cool judgement and warm enthusiasm” has ever found such brilliant reality as in the General Staff in this campaign…However, in spite of everything the Führer has earned the glory, for without his determination things would never have reached such an outcome.’

      On the evening of 12 June, Weygand proposed seeking an armistice. Reynaud suggested that he and his ministers might retain office in exile, but Marshal Philippe Pétain dismissed the notion. On the 16th, Reynaud accepted that most of his ministers favoured capitulation, and resigned in favour of Pétain. The marshal broadcast to the French people next morning: ‘It is with a heavy heart I say to you today that it is necessary to stop fighting.’ Thereafter, few French soldiers saw much purpose in sacrificing their lives on the battlefield.

      Yet there were occasional gallant, futile stands. An infantry battalion near Châteauneuf stubbornly held its positions. Another episode became enshrined in the legend of France: as columns of refugees and deserters from the army fled across the Loire, the commandant of the French cavalry school at Saumur, a hoary old warhorse named Col. Daniel Michon, was ordered to deploy his 780 cadets and instructors to defend the area’s bridges. He assembled them all in Saumur’s great amphitheatre and announced: ‘Gentlemen, for the school it is a mission of sacrifice. France is depending on you.’ One pupil, Jean-Louis Dunand, who had abandoned architectural studies in Paris to become a cadet, wrote exultantly to his parents: ‘I am so impatient to be in the fight, as are all my comrades here. Times a hundred times more painful await me, but I am prepared to meet them with a smile.’

      The local mayor had already lost his own soldier son on the battlefield. Knowing that Pétain intended surrender, he pleaded with Michon not to make ancient Saumur a battlefield. The colonel contemptuously dismissed him: ‘I have an order to defend the town. The honour of the school is at stake.’ He sent away his eight hundred horses, and deployed the cadets in ‘brigades’, each led by an instructor, on a twelve-mile front at likely Loire crossing places; they were reinforced by a few hundred Algerian infantry trainees and army stragglers, supported by a handful of tanks. Just before midnight on 18 June, when leading elements of the German cavalry division led by Gen. Kurt Feldt approached Saumur, they were greeted by a barrage of fire. A German officer advanced beside a French prisoner carrying a white flag, in an attempt to parley. But this provoked shots and explosions which killed both men. Thereafter, as German artillery began to bombard Saumur, fierce little battles erupted the length of the line.

      Some of the defenders acted with a heroism no less memorable because it was self-consciously theatrical. A cadet, Jean Labuze, questioned the order to hold until the last, saying despairingly, ‘One is ready to die, but not to die for nothing.’ His officer responded, shortly before himself being killed: ‘No one dies for nothing. We shall all die for France.’ Another officer, at Milly-le-Meugon, roused the parish priest from his bed at midnight in order that his pupils might be shriven СКАЧАТЬ