The Cost of Courage Read online

  The views of a large portion of the British upper classes are reflected in a repellant ode to Hitler that appears in Homes & Gardens in November 1938. The article oozes admiration of the Führer’s modesty: His gardeners, his chauffeur, and his pilot are “not so much servants as loyal friends.” Air-Marshall Göring is a delightful “bon viveur” [sic] and the Führer himself is a “droll raconteur” who prefers the “society of brilliant foreigners, especially painters, singers and musicians.”

  The dread of anything that might provoke a new world war is equally powerful in France. In 1938, the famous anti-Semitic novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline predicts that a new conflict with Germany will bring twenty-five million casualties, and the “end of the breed … We’ll disappear body and soul from this place like the Gauls.”

  These overwhelming feelings of fearfulness culminate in the tragedy of Munich. The British and French prime ministers, Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier, meet there in September 1938. They agree to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and give Hitler the right to occupy the Sudetenland and all of its fortifications.

  When Chamberlain returns to London, he is hailed as a conquering hero when he calls the accord “peace for our time.”

  The Manchester Guardian is one of the very few British newspapers to identify the agreement’s real significance: “Politically Czecho-Slovakia is rendered helpless, with all that that means to the balance of forces in Eastern Europe, and Hitler will be able to advance again, when he chooses, with greatly increased power.”

  Four days after the agreement is announced, Winston Churchill rises in the House of Commons to give one of the most brutal and prescient speeches of his entire career. After “immense exertions,” said Churchill, the most that Chamberlain had “been able to gain for Czechoslovakia in the matters which were in dispute has been that the German dictator, instead of snatching the victuals from the table, has been content to have them served to him course by course.” Churchill continued:

  All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness … Not only are they politically mutilated, but, economically and financially, they are in complete confusion. Their banking, their railway arrangements, are severed and broken, their industries are curtailed, and the movement of their population is most cruel …

  When I think of the fair hopes of a long peace which still lay before Europe at the beginning of 1933 when Herr Hitler first obtained power, and of all the opportunities of arresting the growth of the Nazi power which have been thrown away, when I think of the immense combinations and resources which have been neglected or squandered, I cannot believe that a parallel exists in the whole course of history …

  We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude which has befallen Great Britain and France. Do not let us blind ourselves to that. It must now be accepted that all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe will make the best terms they can with the triumphant Nazi power. The system of alliances in Central Europe upon which France has relied for her safety has been swept away, and I can see no means by which it can be reconstituted. The road down the Danube Valley to the Black Sea, the road which leads as far as Turkey, has been opened …

  Many people, no doubt, honestly believe that they are only giving away the interests of Czechoslovakia, whereas I fear we shall find that we have deeply compromised, and perhaps fatally endangered, the safety and even the independence of Great Britain and France …

  Do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.

  THE CONVICTIONS EXPRESSED in the home where the Boulloche children grow up are closer to Churchill’s than to Chamberlain’s. The most important intellectual influence on the Boulloche brothers and sisters is their father, Jacques, who was born in 1888.

  Jacques’s reputation for resilience begins when he is still a child. One August night, eleven-year-old Jacques boards a train in Paris with his family to travel to the fashionable beach at Dinard, 250 miles to the west on the Côte d’Émeraude in Brittany.

  At one o’clock in the morning, he pushes on an unlocked door and tumbles off the train into the summer darkness. Miraculously, he lands in a hedge, which cushions him from serious injury.

  Jacques brushes himself off and walks along the tracks for fifteen minutes, until he stops to knock on a stranger’s door to request assistance. The next day, his terrified mother is immensely relieved when she learns that her son is alive and unharmed. Partly because of the prominence of the boy’s father, who sat on the Cour de Cassation, Paris newspapers duly report the event for posterity.

  As the family patriarch, Jacques sees the Second World War coming much sooner than most of his contemporaries. He was brought up by a German governess, he speaks German fluently, and his highway work takes him to Germany frequently during the 1930s. As early as 1937, he is convinced that another war with Germany is inevitable — and he is pessimistic about the outcome.

  One of his favorite sayings is well known to his children: “One German is okay. Five or six? That’s a catastrophe!” (Churchill had his own version of this sentiment: “A Hun alive is a war in prospect,” he told visitors to Chequers in October 1940.)

  Jacques won the Legion of Honor for his service as an officer, fighting the Germans for four years during World War I. Often he was so tired that he fell asleep in the saddle of his horse.

  At three o’clock in the afternoon of November 11, 1918, the day the armistice was declared, he celebrated with a letter to his mother: “The great day has finally arrived — the day of glory and happiness. Everyone is more or less crazy with joy!” Four days later, he joked in a letter to his father that he is about to get Occupation duty in “Bochie” — the land of the Boches, an epithet for the hated Germans.†

  Jacques returned home for leave from time to time, and two of his children, André and Jacqueline, were born while he was at the front. Jacques almost never speaks about his wartime experiences, except to say that he loathes all career military officers. He regards them as “imbeciles,” and he is proud that he knows of none among his ancestors.

  The Boulloches are upper-middle-class Catholics, fierce republicans whose forebears have been prominent lawyers, judges, and civil servants in Paris since the revolution. The family traces its ancestors back to Normandy in the sixteenth century. They migrated there from Scotland, where they had been “Bullocks” or “Bullochs.”

  Whenever the Boulloches stand up for what they believe in, they often stand apart. The Boulloche children are all mindful of their family’s dual pedigrees of patriotism and iconoclasm.

  Their grandfather was the chief magistrate of France, the president of France’s highest court, the Cour de Cassation. His brother, their great-uncle, was his colleague on the same supreme court. After the Jewish army officer named Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason in 1894, these two Boulloche judges maintained the tradition of the Boulloche “exception,” by insisting that Dreyfus was innocent.

  While most of the haute bourgeoisie joined in the anti-Semitic frenzy that produced the Dreyfus prosecution, these Boulloches made themselves traitors to their class by defending the Jewish officer. Characteristically, there was no self-congratulation when Dreyfus was finally exonerated. “We triumph,” declared the chief judge, “but in such sad company.”

  THE CHILDREN OF JACQUES AND HÉLÉNE BOULLOCHE enjoy an unusual amount of freedom. A young friend often at their dinner table remembered Jacques as a “calm and liberal man,” while his wife was “a lover of fine music.”

  Unlike their cousins, who go to Catholic schools, Robert, André, Jacqueline, and Christiane all attend public schools. Their parents encourage intellectual independence, and outsiders are startled by the outspokenness of the children, whose exub
erance is sometimes more than their charming mother can control.

  When she is still very young, Christiane wonders out loud, “How will we feel if we find ourselves in front of Buddha instead of God when we get to heaven?” It is the sort of question that delights her parents.

  André excels at mathematics at the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris, and he is one of the only students who can hold his own discussing philosophy with the teacher after class.

  Precocious but unpretentious, his contemporaries give him the nickname “Boull.” He wins most of the academic prizes, while keeping his classmates amused with risqué magazines like La Vie Parisienne, illustrated with photos of scantily clad young women. Boull even provides forbidden alcohol, the perfect accompaniment for the magazines. Trains, planes, and automobiles are some of his other passions.

  As a teenager, André is struck by the power of money to corrupt, and the young idealist even dreams of returning France to a barter system. At eighteen, he follows his father’s footsteps into the French elite, when he is admitted to the country’s most celebrated grande école, the Ecole polytechnique, or l’X, and, again, like his father, becomes an engineer.

  After that he spends two years at Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (National School of Bridges and Highways), while simultaneously studying for a law degree — because every Boulloche male is still expected to continue centuries of family tradition by studying the law, whether or not he plans to practice it.

  THE BOULLOCHES are “social Catholics,” but they are not particularly observant. They blend a soft anticlericalism with a sharp republican spirit. No priest ever joins them at the dinner table, and by her seventeenth birthday, Christiane is certain there is no God.

  The children grow up surrounded by books and music. Their parents’ favorite writers are Proust and Rimbaud, literary tastes that make them slightly avant-garde. Jacques plays the piano, Hélène is an accomplished violinist, and each of the children also plays an instrument.

  Jacques is kind but serious — almost austere — while Hélène is more playful. Christiane thinks her mother has only one real passion in life: her husband.

  When Christiane is just sixteen months old, her parents leave for a long trip to Indochina, depositing their children with their very stern grandparents. It is a dramatic and difficult change for the older children, who are suddenly forbidden to laugh at the dinner table.

  College chums: André Boulloche is on top smoking a pipe. On his left, André Rondenay steadies himself by holding on to a lamp. Everyone is wearing the uniform of L’Ecole polytechnique. Several years later, Rondenay succeeded Boulloche as de Gaulle’s military delegate in Paris, after Boulloche was arrested.(photo credit 1.4)

  In a letter home during their stay in colonial Saigon, Hélène jokes to her ten-year-old son André that she is disappointed when a Chinese man hosting a party is not smoking opium when she meets him, although “he did have his pipe next to him!”

  When the parents finally return, Hélène is furious when she hears Christiane calling her nurse “Mother.”

  Their father is famous for his genuineness, and his children inherit that trait, together with a profound sense of duty. “It was not taught,” Christiane remembered. “It was implicit. There was no discussion at all. But it was in the air — that’s for sure.”

  THE FINAL FRANCO-BRITISH BLUNDER in the run-up to World War II is the failure of the two countries to forge an alliance with the Soviet Union against Hitler. After Britain and France bungle the Russians’ feelers, Hitler seizes the opportunity to secure his eastern flank. On August 23, 1939, archenemies Hitler and Stalin astound the world by announcing a nonaggression pact.

  Ten-year-old Stanley Hoffmann, who would grow up to become a brilliant political scientist and an expert in French history, was vacationing in the Alps with his mother when news of the pact arrived in the tiny village where they were staying. “It was as if the plague had suddenly struck,” Hoffmann remembered. Even at his young age, he “understood at once that this meant war — that Hitler had free hands for his next aggression and that Britain and France could no longer weasel out.”

  The West considers Stalin’s decision to make temporary peace with Hitler typical “Communist duplicity.” But as the historian James Stokesbury points out, for Stalin it was a “simple either- or proposition”: “Either he could ally with Britain and France, in which case there would be a war, a war that Russia was expected to fight while Britain and France sat and waited it out, after which, when Germany and Russia had destroyed each other, France and Britain would move in and pick up the pieces; or, he could make a deal with Hitler, they could divide Poland between them, Hitler would (probably) turn west, and Germany, France, and Britain would fight it out, after which Stalin would move in and pick up the pieces.”

  The secret protocol of the Hitler-Stalin pact — widely rumored but publicly denied — divides Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania into separate spheres of influence for Germany and the Soviet Union. Freed of fears of a battle with the Communist monolith, Hitler invades Poland nine days later, on September 1. Blackout conditions begin in London the same day. On September 3, Britain and France both declare war on Germany. The New York Times proclaims, “Germans Rush Gayly to Arms, Believing Poland Will Be Crushed in 10 Days.”

  The prediction is nearly correct. By the end of the month, Germany has conquered Poland, and Hitler divides up the country with Stalin. Organized Polish resistance is over by the first week in October.

  * The British diplomat and politician Duff Cooper, who quotes this passage in his autobiography, points out that by this time “anybody who read the newspapers” was already aware “not only of the hideous persecution of the Jews which [Hitler] had initiated, but also of the blood-bath of June 1934 [Night of the Long Knives] in which he had slaughtered without trial so many of his own closest associates.” (Old Men Forget, p. 197)

  † At the end of World War I, Canadian general Andrew McNaughton said of the Germans, “We have them on the run. That means we will have to do it over again in another 25 years.” Or, as satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer put it in 1965, “We taught them a lesson in 1918 — and they’ve hardly bothered us since then.”

  Four

  Throughout the ’30’s, France and Britain had been slow, often indecisive and hopelessly outmaneuvered by Hitler’s devilish strokes. The ponderous bourgeois gentlemen in heavy suits and hats who led the Western democracies didn’t have a chance against the cunning gangster.

  — Stanley Hoffmann

  THE CONCLUSION of the German campaign in Poland in the fall of 1939 marks the beginning of the Phony War. This period of relative calm will last seven months on most of the European continent. Churchill calls it the Twilight War. In France it is drôle de guerre (funny or strange war); in Germany, Sitzkrieg (sitting war — a pun on Blitzkrieg.)

  While Russia invades Finland at the end of November, and Germany and Britain engage in occasional skirmishes at sea, French and German troops remain mostly silent, as they gape “at each other from behind their rising fortifications” on France’s eastern front, throughout the winter of 1939.

  After her father moves his wife and daughters out of Paris in the fall of 1939, Christiane Boulloche embraces her new life at the lycée in Fontainebleau. Her classes are smaller than they were in the capital, and she excels with very little effort. Her parents agree to board a French officer who teaches at the artillery school in Fontainebleau, and his twenty-something students are frequent guests at the Boulloche dinner table — a beguiling circumstance for a fifteen-year-old girl.

  At the end of 1939, most French officers still believe in France’s military superiority, and that is the opinion Christiane hears at her dinner table. Like most French people (except de Gaulle), the Boulloches still hope that they will be protected by the Maginot Line, the massive fortifications France has built above- and belowground along the German border between 1929 and 1940. They also think that when the war
finally comes to France, it will be a short one.

  Christiane enjoys the period before Germany invades France. It feels like a “new and exciting adventure.” But she is jealous of her brothers, because they are actually able to do something, by being in the army. Predictably, her brother André is dissatisfied with his calm life as a lieutenant with the 6th régiment du génie (engineers) on the eastern front. Starving for action, he snares a transfer to the aviation officers’ school in Dinard.

  As the Phony War continues through the winter, more and more children are evacuated from the northeast corner of France in anticipation of the expected invasion. While their parents stay behind to work, the children are relocated to places like the golf club in Fontainebleau. The children’s presence, and a nightly blackout, are the only things Christiane experiences that make the possibility of an actual war seem real. Jacqueline, who has recently graduated from Sciences Po (the institute of Political Science in Paris), spends her days working with the refugee children from the north.

  The eight-month-long lull between the time Britain and France declare war on Germany and the moment when full-scale hostilities begin does not work to the Allies’ advantage. After Hitler and Stalin announce their nonaggression pact in August 1939, the French Communists take their cue from Moscow and end their active opposition to the Nazis. They denounce the war as “an imperialist and capitalist crime against democracy.”

  Meanwhile, morale plunges among French troops, who are undermined by shortages of socks and blankets, as well as simple inaction. Even the weather conspires against the French: The winter of 1939–1940 is the coldest France has shivered through since 1893.