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Messerschmitts machine-gunning refugees. Richey met a fellow airman in the mess: ‘A disillusioned Johnny almost reluctantly said, “They are shits after all.” From this moment our concept of a chivalrous foe was dead.’ Private Ernie Farrow of the British Army’s 2nd Norfolks likewise recoiled from the carnage wrought by Goering’s knights of the air: ‘All along the road were people who had been killed with no arms, no heads, there was cattle lying about dead, there was little tiny children, there was old people. Not one or two, but hundreds of them lying about … We couldn’t stop to clear the road … so we had to drive our lorries over the top of them, which was heart-breaking – really heart-breaking.’

At Reynaud’s new refuge of government, the Château de Chissay on the Loire, his mistress Hélène de Portes was seen directing visitors’ cars, clad in a red dressing gown over pyjamas. Her impassioned influence was exercised to persuade the prime minister to agree an armistice. Reynaud wrote sadly later, after Portes’ death in a car crash, that she ‘was led astray by her desire to be in with the young … and to distance herself from Jews and old politicians. But she thought she was helping me.’ Portes’ mood reflected that of much of her nation. At Sully-sur-Loire a woman, red with anger and excitement, shouted at a French officer standing in front of a church: ‘What are you waiting for, you soldiers, to stop this war? Do you want them to massacre us all with our children? … Why are you still fighting? That Reynaud! If I could get hold of him, the scoundrel!’

At the headquarters of the Wehrmacht, euphoria prevailed. Gen. Eduard Wagner wrote on 15 June: ‘It should really be recorded for the history of our times and of the world how [Wehrmacht chief of staff Franz] Halder sits at the million-scale map and measures off the distances with a metre-rule and already deploys across the Loire. I doubt whether [Gen. Hans von] Seeckt’s synthesis of “cool judgement and warm enthusiasm” has ever found such brilliant reality as in the General Staff in this campaign … However, in spite of everything the Führer has earned the glory, for without his determination things would never have reached such an outcome.’

On the evening of 12 June, Weygand proposed seeking an armistice. Reynaud suggested that he and his ministers might retain office in exile, but Marshal Philippe Pétain dismissed the notion. On the 16th, Reynaud accepted that most of his ministers favoured capitulation, and resigned in favour of Pétain. The marshal broadcast to the French people next morning: ‘It is with a heavy heart I say to you today that it is necessary to stop fighting.’ Thereafter, few French soldiers saw much purpose in sacrificing their lives on the battlefield.

Yet there were occasional gallant, futile stands. An infantry battalion near Châteauneuf stubbornly held its positions. Another episode became enshrined in the legend of France: as columns of refugees and deserters from the army fled across the Loire, the commandant of the French cavalry school at Saumur, a hoary old warhorse named Col. Daniel Michon, was ordered to deploy his 780 cadets and instructors to defend the area’s bridges. He assembled them all in Saumur’s great amphitheatre and announced: ‘Gentlemen, for the school it is a mission of sacrifice. France is depending on you.’ One pupil, Jean-Louis Dunand, who had abandoned architectural studies in Paris to become a cadet, wrote exultantly to his parents: ‘I am so impatient to be in the fight, as are all my comrades here. Times a hundred times more painful await me, but I am prepared to meet them with a smile.’

The local mayor had already lost his own soldier son on the battlefield. Knowing that Pétain intended surrender, he pleaded with Michon not to make ancient Saumur a battlefield. The colonel contemptuously dismissed him: ‘I have an order to defend the town. The honour of the school is at stake.’ He sent away his eight hundred horses, and deployed the cadets in ‘brigades’, each led by an instructor, on a twelve-mile front at likely Loire crossing