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part of the army, and most of its commanders, fall apart. ‘It was a rotten march,’ he wrote, ‘and the [Fusiliers] were progressively broken up by lost and sometimes disordered fragments of other units surging in on us from the side roads … There was over-much to brood upon … One could not fail to be aware of the loss of grip somewhere in our army. Our men knew it soon enough, and it became the task of the officers to stifle the subject – or laugh at it … Something pretty bad was happening. But it was no more the fault of our regiments than the shambles of the Crimea had been … I saw no reason … why that critical retreat was not effectively controlled.’

Meanwhile, French commanders appeared to inhabit a fantasy world. Gamelin’s staff officers marvelled to see him at lunch in his headquarters on 19 May, joking and making light conversation while his subordinates despaired. At 2100 that night, about the time the first panzers reached the Channel at the mouth of the Somme, on Reynaud’s orders Gamelin was replaced as France’s military leader by seventy-three-year-old General Maxime Weygand. The new supreme commander realised that the Allies’ only chance was to launch counter-attacks from the south and north against the German flanks in the vicinity of Arras, to break the encirclement of Belgium and north-east France. Sir Edmund Ironside, the British CIGS visiting from London, reached the same conclusion. Meeting two French generals, Gaston Billotte and Georges Blanchard, at Lens, Ironside was disgusted by their inertia. Both men were ‘in a state of complete depression. No plan, no thought of a plan. Ready to be slaughtered. Defeated at the head without casualties.’ Ironside urged an immediate attack south towards Amiens, with which Billotte promised to cooperate. Ironside then telephoned Weygand. They agreed that two French and two British divisions would attack next morning, the 21st.

Yet Gort never believed the French would move, and he was right. When the two weak British formations advanced next day they did so alone, and without air support. The Germans were initially thrown into disarray as Gort’s columns struck west of Arras. There was fierce fighting, and the British advanced ten miles, taking four hundred prisoners, before the attack ran out of steam. Erwin Rommel, commanding a panzer division, took personal command of the defence and rallied his surprised and confused units. Matilda tanks inflicted significant German losses, killing Rommel’s ADC at his side. But by then the British had shot their bolt; the attack was courageously and effectively delivered, but lacked sufficient weight to be decisive.

On the morning of that same day, the 21st, even as the British were moving towards Arras, Weygand set off from Vincennes for the northern front, in hopes of organising a more ambitious counterstroke. After waiting two hours at Le Bourget for a plane, the C-in-C’s trip descended into farce. Arriving at Béthune, he found the airfield deserted save for a single scruffy soldier guarding petrol stocks. This man eventually drove the general to a post office where he was able to telephone the army group commander, Billotte, who had spent the morning searching for Weygand around Calais. The C-in-C, after pausing for an omelette at a country inn, used a plane to reach the port, then crawled by car along roads jammed with refugees to meet Belgium’s King Leopold at Ypres town hall. He urged the monarch to hasten his army’s retreat westward, but Leopold was reluctant to abandon Belgian soil. Billotte said that only the British, thus far scarcely engaged, were fit to attack. To Weygand’s anger – for he wrongly saw a snub – Lord Gort did not join the meeting.

When the BEF’s commander belatedly reached Ypres, without much conviction he agreed to join a new counter-attack, but said that all his reserves were committed. He never believed any combined Anglo-French thrust would take place. Weygand later claimed that the British were bent on betraying their ally: this reflected a profound French conviction, dating back to World War I,