All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [45]
Many of them were small tailors or peddlers from Belleville, the workman’s quarter of Paris, or from the ghetto of the Rue du Temple. No one would have anything to do with them at [the training camp of] Barcares … They spoke only Yiddish. They looked as if they were afraid of a machine-gun, they seemed to be in perpetual fear. Yet under fire, if volunteers were needed to fetch back munitions under a heavy shelling or if lines of barbed wire entanglements had to be up at night fairly in front of the enemy guns, these little men were the first to offer their service. They did it quietly without swagger, perhaps without enthusiasm; but they did it. It was always they who, up to the very last moment, brought back our arms from an abandoned post.
Wehrmacht commanders expressed admiration for the manner in which some French units fought in early June to defend their new line on the Somme. A German diarist wrote: ‘In these ruined villages the French resisted to the last man. Some “hedgehogs” carried on when our infantry was twenty miles behind them.’ But on 6 June the front was decisively breached, and by the 9th von Rundstedt’s tanks were driving into Rouen. Next day, they broke the Aisne line as the French government left Paris; diplomat Jean Chauvel set fire to the chimney of his office in the Quai d’Orsay as he burned a mass of papers in its fireplace, one of many such symbolic bonfires of his nation’s hopes. There were fears that, with the administration gone, socialist workers from the suburbs would march into the capital and proclaim a new Commune. Instead, when so many inhabitants had fled, there was only a macabre tranquillity: on 12 June in a smart Paris street, a Swiss journalist was bemused to meet a herd of abandoned cattle, lowing plaintively. The fall of the capital two days later caused the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, a Jew now in remote exile, to write: ‘Few of my own misfortunes have dismayed me and filled me with despair as much as the humiliation of Paris, a city that was blessed like no other with the ability to make anyone who came there happy.’
The great flight of civilians west and south continued by day and night. ‘Silently, with no lights on, cars kept coming, one after the other,’ wrote Irène Némirovsky, ‘full to bursting with baggage and furniture, prams and birdcages, packing cases and baskets of clothes, each with a mattress tied firmly to the roof. They looked like mountains of fragile scaffolding and they seemed to move without the aid of a motor, propelled by their own weight.’ Némirovsky described three hapless civilian victims of air attack: ‘Their bodies had been torn to shreds, but by chance their three faces were untouched. Such gloomy, ordinary faces, with a dim, fixed, stunned expression as if they were trying in vain to understand what was happening to them; they weren’t made, my God, to die in a battle, they weren’t made for death.’
RAF fighter pilot Paul Richey saw a Luftwaffe bomb fall upon four farmworkers as they tilled a field: ‘We found them among the craters. The old man lay face down, his body twisted grotesquely, one leg shattered and a savage gash across the back of his neck, oozing steadily into the earth. His son lay close by … Against the hedge I found what must have been the remains of the third boy – recognizable only by a few tattered rags, a broken boot and some splinters of bone. The five stricken horses lay bleeding beside the smashed harrow, we shot them later. The air was foul with the reek of high explosive.’
In those days when Europeans were still losing their innocence, British pilots were stunned by the spectacle of