Brave Genius Page 9

  This very hour another dictatorship has stabbed France in the back. Another frontier is threatened. A naval war will begin.

  You have replied generously to the appeal which I made to you a few days ago across the Atlantic. Today this 10th of June 1940 it is my duty to ask you for new and even larger assistance.

  At the same time that you explain this situation to the men and women of America, I beseech you to declare publicly that the United States will give the Allies aid and material support by all means, “short of an expeditionary force.” I beseech you to do this before it is too late. I know the gravity of such a gesture. Its very gravity demands that it should not be made too late.

  You said to us yourself on the 5th of October 1937: “I am compelled and you are compelled to look ahead. The peace, the freedom and the security of 90% of the population of the world is being jeopardized by the remaining 10% who are threatening a breakdown of all international order and law.”

  Surely the 90% who want to live in peace under law and in accordance with moral standards that have received almost trusty acceptance through the centuries, can and must find some way to make their will prevail.

  The hour has now come for these.

  Paul Reynaud

  AROUND MIDNIGHT, REYNAUD and de Gaulle climbed into a car together and headed south for Orléans.

  One crucial issue that Reynaud did not address before leaving was whether Paris would be defended. Weygand had informed him that day that Paris was to be an open city, and that it was his intention not to defend it. Unfortunately, this decision was not passed on to the military commander of Paris or to the public. Instead, the French radio declared, “Should the Germans reach Paris, we shall defend every stone, every clod of earth, every lamp-post, every building, for we would rather have our city razed to the ground than fall into the hands of Germans.”

  Up until the time when the government departed, the population had been draining out of Paris. Now the stream of refugees turned into a flood. Thanks to the radio announcements and the appearance of handbills declaring “Citoyens! Aux armes!” (Citizens! To arms!), the widespread expectations were that Paris would be bombed and that there would be house-to-house fighting as the Army and civilian volunteers made a last stand to defend the capital. While about one-third of the city’s population of nearly three million left during the first month of the war, nearly that many would leave in just the next several days. Overall, 70 percent of the metropolitan area’s prewar population of five million would take to the roads, joining the columns of civilian refugees from Holland, Belgium, and northern and eastern France, as well as soldiers heading to or away from the front. The swarms of refugees appeared to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, aviator and future author of The Little Prince, as though “somewhere in the north of France a boot had scattered an ant-hill, and the ants were on the march.”

  With the government leaving and danger imminent, it was also time for the newspapers to shut down or to relocate. Almost all newspapers ceased publication on June 10 or June 11. The owner of Paris-Soir, Jean Prouvost, was as well informed as anyone about the situation, for he was also Reynaud’s minister for information. He had begun preparations well in advance for moving the newspaper’s operations to the south. He gave the order on June 9 for the remaining staff to clear out of Paris and to head for Clermont-Ferrand, 230 miles away, where arrangements had been made with a publisher who had offered the use of printing facilities there. That publisher was the former prime minister Pierre Laval.

  Camus was asked to drive one of the paper’s executives. Accompanied by another staff member, they drove all night on roads choked with refugees and abandoned automobiles. The executive chatted with Camus to make sure that he would stay alert. When they reached the center of Clermont-Ferrand, the car was out of gas, oil, and water. As the radiator steamed, Camus suddenly realized that in the rush to leave, he might have left some manuscripts back in his room in Paris. He jumped out of the car and threw open the trunk, and was relieved to find in his valise the complete text of The Stranger.

  ABANDONED

  On June 11, the sun did not rise.

  Parisians awoke to a dark, eerie sky unlike any they had seen before. Clouds of dense smoke filled the air, blotting out the morning light. A fine black soot fell across the city. In a capital already besieged by wild rumors—the two most optimistic being that the French Army had turned back the Germans and that America had entered the war—the black fog was reported to be everything from German smokescreens to a sign of the apocalypse.

  The actual source of the heavy smoke was the deliberate destruction of oil depots on the outskirts of Paris to keep the supplies out of the hands of the enemy. But Parisians could not learn this, as there were no longer any newspapers to investigate or report the cause.

  Under the dark sky, the parade of people hurriedly leaving the capital continued. Those Parisians who remained watched the exodus from their doorways or window ledges. They saw an endless procession of cars and trucks overloaded with passengers and furniture, pushcarts piled with family treasures, horse-drawn wagons, bicycles, and streams of people on foot.

  There were no taxis or buses to be found. All of the train stations but two, Gare de Lyon and Gare d’Austerlitz, were closed. Around the latter were mobs of people of all sorts of nationalities—Belgian, Dutch, British, as well as French—desperate to go anywhere away from the approaching Germans. In the chaos, many children became separated from their parents, some by accident, some when parents chose to put them in the limited seats available on the few trains that were running. By midday, the wind had blown the black fog away and the day had become sunny and very hot, adding to the misery of those crammed into the stations or sitting in railcars.

  After several days of confusion, Monod’s unit finally received orders to leave. Until then, it had not been clear whether they would retreat or be assigned to the defense of Paris. The order came as he was digging antitank trenches around Versailles. They left in the middle of the night on a train headed south, away from the Germans, their destination unknown. Monod tried to keep Odette updated on his whereabouts. Before leaving, he wrote, “I don’t know where we are going nor how … Take good care of yourself and our little ones. You are my only reason to be. I love you. May God help you.” The next day he wrote her from a cattle car in the Argenton-sur-Creuse train station, 180 miles south of Paris. The train was not strafed or bombed, but derailed on its way to Périgueux, another seventy-five miles southwest of Argenton, in the Dordogne region. Monod would reach the ancient town on the thirteenth of June.

  Desperate to contact Odette, he sent cables to Dinard but received no reply. He feared that Brittany had been cut off by the Germans, and that Odette had left and joined the swarms of refugees. He was able to get a letter off to his parents in Cannes, asking them to contact him in Périgueux if they heard from Odette. He told them, “The only things that matter in the current cataclysm are Odette, the kids, you, Philo … In the face of the horrible tragedy that is threatening us with devastation, we must look deep inside ourselves for the last drop of hope and energy.” With Cannes just forty miles from the Italian border, he had to worry, too, about his parents. He added, “I think that the despicable bastards next to you are going to leave you alone. The newspapers seem to say so. I love you, my dear parents, but I don’t have the courage to write more.”

  By Wednesday, June 12, many Parisians who had intended to stay left. With no customers, workers, or supplies, shops and restaurants closed. With no guests, hotels closed. Some stores were abandoned without the owners even bothering to lock the doors. Neighborhoods were empty.

  The sky was eerily quiet for the first time since the battles began: No Allied or German planes were overhead. But the distant rumble of artillery could be heard.

  At 12:15 p.m. General Weygand at last informed Gen. Pierre Héring, the military governor, that Paris was to be declared an open city. No defense would take place around or within the city. Notices were
posted the next day that urged the population “to abstain from all hostile acts and … to maintain the dignity and composure required by these circumstances.”

  By the evening of June 13, the city was virtually deserted. There were no streetlights. No lights shone whatsoever. The Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Élysées were empty and so quiet that one could hear the echo of individual footsteps.

  AT DAWN THE morning of June 14, two motorcycles roared down the Champs-Élysées, followed by two command cars flying the swastika flag. By eight a.m., a motorized unit entered the city and raced to City Hall. Wave after wave of trucks, tanks, and motorcycles arrived, along with columns of gray-uniformed soldiers. The invaders fanned out across the city, replacing the French tricolor with the German swastika and taking up positions at the monuments and along the great boulevards. Submachine-gun-bearing sentinels were posted around the Arc de Triomphe, and cannons were pointed up each of the boulevards leading to the monument. After two generals paid their respects at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the parading began and went on all day.

  Parisians, if they could bear to watch, looked on with a combination of disbelief and dread.

  German troops parade down the Champs-Élysées in front of the Arc de Triomphe on June 14, 1940. (AP Images)

  CHAPTER 5

  DEFEATED AND DIVIDED

  A house divided against itself cannot stand.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN, June 16, 1858

  ANOTHER CATALYST TO THE MASS EXODUS WAS THE RECOMMENDATION, issued by radio, that all men aged eighteen to fifty leave Paris immediately. The concern was that these men would be conscripted by the Germans, or at least taken into custody.

  Nineteen-year-old medical student François Jacob was in the middle of second-year exams when it became clear that the Germans would soon enter the capital. He and three of his classmates secured a black Citroën 11 and took off south, just a few days ahead of the invaders.

  It took Jacob and his comrades several days to cover the 250 miles to Vichy, through and around the masses of refugees crowding the roads—“a river of torment and fear” that flowed south. Six to eight million refugees were displaced from their homes and farms, overwhelming every city and village they reached. There was nowhere for the dazed and exhausted castaways to sleep, little to eat, and not enough water. Jacob and his fellow travelers saw for themselves the disarray of the military as they shared the roads with defeated soldiers in retreat.

  The grandson of the first Jewish four-star general, Jacob had been raised to believe in the “indestructible framework of the country.” In just a few days on the road, Jacob had witnessed “a whole nation disintegrate.” Staring quietly out the car window at the disaster around him, he thought about the seemingly secure world that had once surrounded him—“the country, the Republic with its institutions and its laws, its army and its justice. And suddenly the whole edifice has caved in.”

  Jacob stopped in Vichy to see his father, Simon, who had taken refuge there with his two grandmothers. But he and his friends were determined to continue southwest, to get as far away from the invaders as quickly as possible. On the morning of June 17, Jacob’s twentieth birthday, the very day he would become eligible for military service, he left behind his father, who was on the verge of tears as he slowly waved good-bye to his son, unsure when or if they would see each other again.

  Crawling along the road clogged with cars, trucks, bicycles, and carts, Jacob was overwhelmed by the magnitude and the swiftness of the collapse: “Everything I believed in, everything that I thought I’d believe for life, everything that seemed the very basis of our existence, forming our protective armature, that seemed to shape our view of the world: all this crumbled in an instant. In an instant, the country has foundered. In an instant, despite its great men and its great schools, its generals and its institutions, its teachers and its senate, it has collapsed, body and soul.”

  Talk in the car turned toward whom to blame. Foremost, there was the madman Hitler, who, “foaming at the mouth and screaming maledictions, had coolly decided to put the world to the test of fire and blood.” But, Jacob thought, guilt also fell on the “governments of bunglers, manipulated in the shadows by degenerates, [that] did not know how, or did not dare, to stop him.”

  The government had first taken flight for Tours and then, when that city too was about to be taken by the Germans, it would move quickly on to Bordeaux, a port city on the Garonne River in southwestern France. The bungling and manipulation had not yet reached its lowest point.

  TO SURRENDER OR FIGHT?

  Over the course of three long days in Tours, Premier Reynaud’s cabinet and military commanders had wrangled over the two viable choices before them—to continue the fight from abroad or to seek an armistice. General Weygand and Marshal Pétain led the latter contingent, while Reynaud and de Gaulle searched for any possible means of carrying on the fight. Reynaud was supported by Churchill, who flew over to meet with the command. Churchill wanted the French to hold out at all costs, for that would buy the British more time to prepare, and hopefully would weaken what Hitler could throw at England. In March, France had pledged to Britain that it would not seek a separate peace agreement with Germany; Reynaud reiterated that pledge.

  The division within the government, however, was becoming wider, and the pressure on Reynaud to surrender was increasing as the military situation deteriorated. As the ministers looked out the windows from their meeting room in the Château de Cangé at the pathetic sight of refugees streaming by, General Weygand urged, “If an armistice is not demanded immediately, disorder will spread to the armies as it already has to the population.”

  Reynaud continued to refuse. Weygand took another approach, arguing that a government established outside of France itself would have no recognized authority and could not regain what had been lost.

  Marshal Pétain lent Weygand his support, stating, “The duty of the government, regardless of what happens, is to remain in the country or else it will not be recognized as such.” He concluded, “The armistice, in my opinion, is the necessary condition for the perpetuity of an eternal France.”

  ONCE THEY REACHED Bordeaux, de Gaulle sought to bolster Reynaud’s resolve. He told the premier, “For the last three days we have been speedily rolling toward capitulation … I myself refuse to submit to an armistice. If you remain here you are going to be submerged by the defeat. You must go to Algeria at once. Are you—yes or no—decided on that?”

  “Yes!” Reynaud declared.

  “In that case,” de Gaulle said, “I should go tomorrow to London to arrange for British shipping to help us. Where will I find you again?”

  “You will find me in Algeria,” Reynaud answered.

  REYNAUD ASKED THE cabinet to consider moving the government to North Africa. Georges Mandel, minister of the interior, backed the proposal. He reminded the cabinet of the pledge Reynaud had made to President Roosevelt that France would continue the fight from North Africa, if necessary. Pétain and Weygand maintained their opposition to any relocation.

  For the next two days, June 15 and 16, the impasse between Reynaud and Weygand and the division within the cabinet continued. Reynaud secured the agreement of the heads of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies to move the government to North Africa. Before a critical cabinet meeting on the afternoon of the sixteenth, when the ministers were likely to arrive at their ultimate decision—armistice or going abroad—de Gaulle phoned Reynaud from London with a stunning development: the British government was proposing the formation of a union between Great Britain and France. The language was as stirring as the idea itself:

  At this most fateful moment in the history of the modern world, the Governments 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 …

  The two Governments declare that France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations 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.

  Reynaud was astounded and delighted. He had not been able to solicit any concrete commitment from the United States, but now their cross-Channel ally was offering a bold, historic gesture. The proposal had been forged in just two days by French diplomats. After some personal persuasion by de Gaulle, it had been endorsed by Churchill.

  It arrived not a moment too soon. Reynaud’s ministers had been slipping down the slope toward an armistice. Reynaud believed that the British proposal would turn the tide.

  But he was sold out. Someone leaked the proposal to the cabinet before he could announce it. Weygand and others rallied opposition to the idea. When Reynaud told the cabinet he was planning to meet Churchill the next day to announce the union, he was greeted with silence. Several opponents then spoke out against the union, expressing indignation at the proposal that “would have placed France in a state of vassalage.”

  These ministers apparently gave less consideration to what an armistice with Germany would produce. Mandel warned them, “You imagine that by capitulating you will sleep in peace and pick up the routine of an easy, comfortable life. But the war will continue over your heads … the war will begin again on our soil … By surrendering, you fancy you will win rest and quiet. Instead you will reap only the contempt of the world and ultimately of yourselves.” He concluded that there were two types of men in attendance, “the brave and the cowards” or “those who wish to fight, and those who do not.”