All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [39]
Pierre Lesort described ‘an immediate impression of total disorder and shameful despair. Belongings pushed on bikes, helmets and guns out of sight, and the appearance of dazed vagrants … By the side of the road a man was standing alone, immobile. Wearing a black cap and short cassock: a military chaplain … I saw that he was crying.’ Another soldier, Gustave Folcher, wrote of encounters with men of broken units from the north: ‘They told us terrible things, unbelievable things … Some had come from as far as the Albert Canal … They asked for something to eat and drink; poor lads! They streamed on endlessly; it was a piteous sight. Ah, if those enthusiasts who go and watch the magnificent military parades in Paris or elsewhere could have seen on that morning this other army, the real one … perhaps they would understand the suffering of the soldier.’
A sense of unreality at first pervaded French public consciousness as the familiar world began to disintegrate. The Russian-born Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky described in her autobiographical novel of 1940–41, Suite française, the disbelieving response in Paris to news of stunning German advances: ‘Even though the reports were terrible, no one believed them. No more so than if victory had been announced.’ But as the truth began to be understood, panic swept the nation. Among the most terrible aspects of those days was the massed flight of civilians, which impacted as disastrously on military communications as upon soldiers’ morale. The people of eastern France had suffered German occupation in 1914; they were determined to escape another such experience. Much of the population of Rheims fled, only one-tenth of Lille’s 200,000 inhabitants stayed in their homes, and just eight hundred of Chartres’ 23,000 people after the cathedral city was heavily bombed. Many places became ghost towns.
Throughout eastern and central France, army units found themselves struggling to deploy for action amid huge columns of desperate humanity. Gustave Folcher wrote:
The people are half-mad, they don’t even reply to what we ask them. There is only one word in their mouths: evacuation, evacuation … What is most pitiful is to see entire families on the road, with their livestock they force to follow them, but that they finally have to leave in some cattle-pen. We see wagons drawn by two, three or four beautiful mares, some with a young foal which follows at the risk of being crushed every few metres. The wagon is driven by a woman, often in tears, but most of the time it’s a kid of eight, ten or perhaps twelve years old who leads the horses. On the wagon, on which furniture, trunks, linen, the most precious things, or rather the most indispensable things, have been hastily packed up, the grandparents have also taken their place, holding in their place a very young child, even a newborn baby … The children look at us one by one as we overtake them, holding in their hands the little dog, the little cat or the cage of canaries they didn’t want to be separated from.
Eight million French people abandoned their homes in the month following the onset of the German assault, the greatest mass migration in west European history. Those families who stayed in Paris found themselves repeatedly driven into shelters by alarms: ‘They had to dress their children by torchlight,’ wrote one of those who experienced them. ‘Mothers lifted small, warm, heavy bodies into their arms: “Come on, don’t be afraid, don’t cry.” An air raid. All the lights were out, but beneath the clear, golden June sky, every house, every street was visible. As for the Seine, the river seemed to absorb even the faintest glimmers of light and reflect them