The Cost of Courage Read online

  In November 1939, Jean-Paul Sartre writes in his diary that the men who were mobilized with him were “raring to go at the outset,” but three months later they are “dying of boredom.”

  WHEN THE GERMANS finally storm into Holland and Belgium on May 10, 1940, the impact is felt almost instantly in Fontainebleau. Christiane experiences the effects of the crushing advance of the enemy, as thousands flee in front of the German blitzkrieg, traveling in horse-drawn carriages and cars overflowing with exhausted women and children.

  No one has expected the Germans to roll over the French Army so quickly, not even Germany’s own generals. In England, Neville Chamberlain resigns as prime minister, as his dream of “peace for our time” evaporates, and the king summons Winston Churchill to Buckingham Palace to form a new government to fight the war.

  Churchill is appalled by the speed of the German onslaught. The new prime minister learns that German tanks are advancing at least thirty miles a day through the French countryside, passing through “scores of towns and hundreds of villages without the slightest opposition, their officers looking out of the open cupolas and waving jauntily to the inhabitants. Eyewitnesses [speak] of crowds of French prisoners marching along with them, many still carrying their rifles, which were from time to time collected and broken under the tanks … The whole German movement was proceeding along the main roads, which at no point seemed to be blocked.”

  With hundreds of thousands of refugees now surging southward, Jacques Boulloche once again tries to move his wife and daughters out of danger. This time he sends them to an aunt’s house in Perros-Guirec, in Brittany, in the northwest corner of France, far from the Germans’ invasion route. Christiane is miserable because she has a new puppy that she isn’t allowed to bring with her, and she never sees that dog again.

  But when the three Boulloche women flee Fontainebleau at the end of May, they are much more fortunate than the refugees who had been housed at the golf club. The cars carrying those children are bombarded from the air, and scores of them are killed.

  As France’s army is being pulverized at the end of May, a gigantic crowd gathers in front of Sacré-Coeur on the hill above Paris to pray for victory. At the end of the emergency service, fifty thousand voices belt out “The Marseillaise.” More than six million French citizens have already abandoned their homes.

  Across the channel in London, a thirty-year-old foreign correspondent named James Reston writes in the New York Times that a German invasion of the British Isles is now considered nearly certain.* Looking down from a plane, the writer-pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry observes that the mobs of refugees below look like a massive anthill, kicked by a giant.

  ON JUNE 3, more than one hundred German bombers attack Paris. The French authorities claim they have shot down twenty-five of the planes, but the bombardment kills more than 250 Parisians and wounds 600 more.

  “This is what we dreaded for so long, and what we hoped might never happen,” the New York Times declares on its editorial page the next day.

  It seems worse, somehow, than any of the other crimes perpetrated by Germany in this war … Great cities … are more than aggregations of men, women and children. They are the treasure-houses of the Western spirit. Whoever strikes at them strikes at all that man has built through ages of sacrifice and suffering …

  Free men will not endure these things without a new resolve to destroy the forces of evil that have sent the German bombers on their errand. The great columns of smoke and flame that rose above Paris yesterday … were also the first fires of a wrath such as our world has never known. If this kind of fiendishness continues, if Paris and London are to become shambles of ruined buildings and murdered civilians, the fires of hate will not be quenched in our time. The anger of civilized peoples will burn so fiercely that it will consume the hateful German system which has loosed these horrors upon the world.

  The Times is almost alone in its prescience. Certainly no one in France is optimistic about the eventual defeat of the Nazis the day after the bombardment of Paris.

  SIX DAYS LATER, the French government prepares to evacuate Paris. Jacques Boulloche, the director of the national bureau of highways, is ordered to leave the capital for Royan, three hundred miles to the south on the western coast of France. That evening he heads for his country house in Fontainebleau, but his car breaks down on the way, and he doesn’t get there until four o’clock in the morning.

  The next day he opens his fountain pen to write a letter to his wife:

  The Boulloche country house in Fontainebleau, where Jacques Boulloche retreated as the Germans advanced on Paris in 1940.(photo credit 1.5)

  I can’t describe my feelings when I got here, considering all that we’ve had to abandon. And yet, we are among the lucky ones … The peace of the garden and the fragrant smells make the unfolding tragedy seem like nothing more than a bad dream …

  The same day as Jacques writes to his wife, Norway surrenders to the Nazis, and Italy declares war on Britain and France.

  The capital Jacques has left behind is filled with smoke from burning archives and incendiary bombs. On June 10, the French government declares Paris an open city, meaning it will no longer be defended — after the Germans are already inside the city’s gates. There are twenty thousand people jammed outside the doors of Gare d’Austerlitz, trying to force themselves onto trains leaving the capital.

  The New York Times reports on June 13, “The German guns are battering at the hearts and minds of all of us who think of Paris when we try to define what we mean by civilization … Of all cities it expresses best the aspiration of the human spirit.”

  Paris falls the next day, on June 14. By then, its population of three million has shrunk to eight hundred thousand.

  Jacques Boulloche is distraught. His boys are at the front, and his wife and daughters are hundreds of miles away in Brittany. He is terrified that he may never see any of them again. He and his wife have an exceptionally strong bond. They are so close, their children sometimes complain that it’s hard to find any room for themselves in between them.

  On the afternoon of June 15, Jacques sits down at the desk in his room at the Grand Hôtel de Paris in Royan to write another anguished letter to his wife:

  My Beloved,

  Everything is finished. Will we ever see each other again?

  In case you are reunited someday with the children, I have included a message for them in this letter.

  I don’t know what to say, except that I adore you, and I can’t stop thinking about you. Stay calm, courageous and proud.

  I love you, and I still hope that someday we will be reunited.

  Jacques

  And this is what he writes to his children:

  If I never see you again, know that my last thoughts will have been about the four of you.

  I hope you will once again see a free and joyous France.

  I love you with all my heart.

  Your Father

  Jacques

  In a letter to his family, Jacques Boulloche pours out his fears about what the German invasion will bring.(photo credit 1.6)

  * In the underground bedroom Churchill slept in during much of the war, his bed faced a map that highlighted all the possible invasion points of the British Isles.

  Five

  Had all of us in France meekly, lawfully carried out the orders of the German master, no Frenchman could have ever looked another man in the face. Such submission would have saved the lives of many — some very dear to me — but France would have lost its soul.

  — Commandant le Baron de Vomécourt

  ALTHOUGH the German campaign in France lasts less than six weeks before the armistice is declared, the French still suffer enormous casualties. There are ninety thousand French soldiers killed and two hundred thousand wounded. Another two million soldiers are taken prisoner, and a million and a half of them are sent to Germany. These French prisoners will remain on the far side of the Rhine until the war ends, almost exactly
five years later.

  The same day Jacques Boulloche sends his farewell letters to his family, President Roosevelt rejects the Allies’ plea to America to enter the war against Germany at once. Meanwhile, French prime minister Paul Reynaud, who had been an early opponent of appeasement, informs the British that he intends to split his government and lead half of it abroad.

  On June 16, Churchill makes a dramatic gesture to try to convince the French to continue the fight against the Germans. The new British prime minister proposes the merger of France and Britain into an “indissoluble” Franco-British union. A single War Cabinet will direct the affairs of the new nation, to “concentrate its whole energy against the power of the enemy, no matter where the battle may be.”

  But defeatist members of the French cabinet recoil at the idea of a union with their historic rival. They predict that within three weeks, England will “have her neck wrung like a chicken.”* A French minister of state even declares, “Better to be a Nazi province. At least we know what that means.”

  Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, the eighty-four-year-old hero of World War I whom Reynaud had summoned out of retirement a few weeks earlier, leads the fight against a merger with Britain. When Reynaud is unable to convince his colleagues to embrace Churchill’s bold idea, the French prime minster resigns, and Pétain succeeds him as the head of the French government.

  Charles de Gaulle had been wounded three times during World War I, and he spent almost three years in German prison camps. Since the 1930s, he has been a voice in the wilderness, warning of France’s unreadiness to confront the Germans. He has published a book advocating the mechanization of the army and the offensive deployment of tanks, but his fellow officers ignore his advice. A prescient Reynaud has been the only politician to support him.

  De Gaulle has fought as long as he can to keep France in the war. But after Pétain becomes France’s new leader, de Gaulle finally slips away from his office in Bordeaux, on June 17, to be driven to a nearby airfield.

  At nine A.M., he takes off for England in a plane provided by the British. Churchill observed that the solitary French general “carried with him in the small airplane the honor of France.”†

  That evening, Marshal Pétain goes on the radio to tell the French Army to surrender. Christiane listens to Pétain’s broadcast with her aunt and five of her aunt’s six children. The young teenager feels like the sky is falling on her head. She is especially angry when her elderly uncle declares that England will never be able to continue the fight alone. She has no idea that he is echoing the majority view inside the French government.

  Christiane considers her uncle appallingly defeatist: “In spite of everything, I never stopped believing in a miracle — that somehow our army would rise again.” But she is also aware of the state of the French Army: “Not defeated. Crushed.”

  The following evening, Churchill allows de Gaulle to use the BBC to broadcast his first appeal to the French people. This time Christiane is mesmerized. The general’s words have a profound effect on everyone who still believes that the Germans may someday be defeated:‡

  Has the last word been said? Must we abandon all hope? Is our defeat final and irremediable? To those questions, I answer No!… I ask you to believe me when I say that the cause of France is not lost.

  And then the prickly iconoclast minted the phrase that made it possible for all unvanquished French citizens to continue to fight for the honor of their fallen nation:

  Whatever happens, the flame of French Resistance must not, and shall not, die!

  Christiane has never heard of de Gaulle before tonight. Although he had become undersecretary of state for war on June 6, he had only been a colonel before the war.

  When he is introduced on the BBC, Christiane asks herself, “General of Gaul — what rank of officer is that?” As soon as she hears him, she immediately agrees with her male cousins: We must all decamp to England! But none of them is old enough to cross the channel without an adult.

  AT THIS POINT, her older brother André really isn’t any more political than Christiane is. But he shares all of his sister’s instinctive patriotism.

  On the night of June 17 — the same day de Gaulle decamps for London — André distinguishes himself by helping Lieutenant Jean-Pierre Berger blow up the bridge at Marcigny-sur-Loire, between Digoin and Roanne, which slows the German advance a bit.

  As the French government is suing for peace, André retains an unquenchable appetite for action. He decides that he must leave France to avoid surrendering to the enemy. Together with ten of his comrades-in-arms, he sneaks onto a boat leaving Port-Vendres on the Mediterranean coast the day before the armistice is announced.

  From the moment he heard Pétain on the radio saying, “We must stop fighting,” he categorically refused to accept defeat and had only one desire: “to continue and then to resume combat.” André doesn’t base his actions “on a critical analysis of the situation, or a particular political belief … but simply on an elementary conviction: that dignity is incompatible with submission.” Like so many of those who are praying that the Germans’ victory is only temporary, he blends optimism with fatalism. He thinks that “we [will] win in the end, and that it [is] the duty of all Frenchmen to fight for this victory” — but he also thinks it’s unlikely that he will live long enough to witness the German defeat himself.

  André and his compatriots decide that North Africa is the best place to continue the battle against the Germans. But when their cargo freighter reaches Oran in French Algeria, the welcome they receive from the French colonial authorities is not at all what they expect. Instead of being greeted as heroes, they are treated practically like traitors.

  That is because, between the time they leave France and the time they reach North Africa, the new government headed by Pétain has discarded Reynaud’s idea of sending some officials abroad to wage the war in exile, as Belgium, Holland, Poland, and Norway already have — to continue the fight against the Germans from London. Mostly because the Pétain government wants to rid itself of some unwelcome dissenters, on June 21, twenty-four deputies and one senator are allowed to sail away from France to North Africa on an armed auxiliary cruiser, the Massilia.

  When news of the armistice is picked up on the Massilia’s radio two days later, the anti-Nazi legislators on board plead with the captain to change his course for England. But the captain is taking his orders from the new French government, and he continues on to Morocco. When the Massilia reaches Casablanca on June 24, the whole party of government officials is put under ship arrest for nearly three weeks, while Pétain’s cronies debate what to do with them. Finally, they are sent back to France.

  “I embarked on the Massilia never dreaming the Massilia would become a trap,” remembered Pierre Mendès-France, a French prime minister in postwar France. “But quite soon the politicians who had remained in Bordeaux realized they could exploit this and present the departure of the Massilia, with a number of politicians on board, as a sign of panic — an escape, a surrender … And paradoxically a certain number of them — Viénot, Jean Zay and myself — were charged with desertion, when our idea had been to go on fighting.”

  Churchill noted with disgust that these patriots were “disposed of as the Vichy Government thought convenient to themselves, and agreeable to their German masters.”

  By now the new French government has accepted the terms that Hitler’s generals have dictated to them in a railway car at Rethondes, near Compiègne. With revenge at the heart of his brutal campaign, Hitler chooses the exact spot where French General Ferdinand Foch had accepted the surrender of the Germans at the end of World War I, just a quarter century earlier.

  To encourage their rapid acceptance by the French in 1940, the Germans do not make the terms especially harsh. The southern portion of the country will be left unoccupied while the Germans are granted an occupied zone in the north that includes Paris. (The unoccupied zone will also free up more German troops for the expected invas
ion of Britain.) The French Army will be demobilized, except for a force of one hundred thousand to ensure internal order. The fleet will be disarmed and the ships will be docked in their home ports, and the Germans promise they will not touch them. One and a half million French prisoners will remain in captivity until a peace treaty replaces the armistice (which never happens). The cost of keeping German troops in France will be paid for by the French government.

  THREE DAYS after the armistice is declared, Hitler sneaks into Paris for an early-morning visit. He flies into Le Bourget airport with a small entourage that includes Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s official architect. The civilians accompanying him all wear borrowed uniforms, because Hitler has demanded that they dress as soldiers for the trip.

  Thirteen years earlier, a hundred thousand Parisians had mobbed Charles Lindbergh at the same airfield to celebrate his triumphant arrival from New York.§ But today, there are no crowds to greet the Führer.

  Three large Mercedes sedans whisk his party to the ornate Paris Opera House. This is the German leader’s favorite building in the French capital. As a student he even studied its architectural plans, and his French guide is impressed when the dictator asks him what has happened to a particular room. The guide explains that it no longer exists, because of a renovation.

  Fascist sympathizers show their enthusiasm inside the French Chamber of Deputies after the rebroadcast of a speech by Hitler in July 1940.(photo credit 1.7)

  At the end of the opera tour, one of Hitler’s aides offers the guide a 50-mark tip. Albert Speer watches as the Frenchman quietly refuses the gift — twice.