Inferno - Max Hastings [22]
It is hard to overstate the impact of months of passivity upon the spirit of France’s forces. In November 1939 British corps commander Alan Brooke described his sensations on witnessing a parade of the French Ninth Army: “Seldom have I seen anything more slovenly … men unshaven, horses ungroomed, complete lack of pride in themselves or their units. What shook me most, however, was the look in the men’s faces, disgruntled and insubordinate looks … I could not help wondering whether the French are still a firm enough nation to again take their part in seeing this war through.” Exiled Poles, of whom some thousands were now attached to the French forces, noted with dismay the equivocal attitudes displayed by their allies: the pilot Franciszek Kornicki wrote that “both the French communists and fascists worked against us, and Lyons was full of the former. One day somebody made a friendly gesture, but another day someone else would swear at you.”
A French soldier, the writer Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote in his diary on 26 November: “All the men … were raring to go at the outset, but now they are dying of boredom.” Another soldier, Georges Sadoul, wrote on 13 December: “The days pass, interminable and empty, without the slightest occupation … The officers, mainly reservists, think no differently from the men … One feels they are weary of the war, they say and repeat that they would like to go home.” On 20 February 1940, Sartre observed: “The war machine is running in neutral … Only yesterday a sergeant was telling me, with a gleam of insane hope in his eyes: ‘What I think is, it’ll all be arranged, England will climb down.’ ”
The British were equally baffled. Jack Classon, a young shopworker in Everton, Lancashire, wrote to a friend in the army: “The war doesn’t seem to make much headway, does it? We read one thing in the paper in the morning, the denial the following day, & it’s killing business. You can blame my gloom on the black curtains that drape the shop & the blued windows that stare at you when you go upstairs … The Curzon cinema has had for the last week or so Henry Croudson the organist as guest … some people are enjoying that more than the picture, his most popular number at the moment being ‘We’ll Hang Out The Washing On The Siegfried Line.’ The audience raises the roof when he plays that.”
One and a half million British women and children, evacuated from the cities amid the threat of German bombing, suffered agonies of homesickness in an unfamiliar rural environment. One of them, Derek Lambert, a nine-year-old from London’s Muswell Hill, later recalled: “We went to strange beds and lay with fists clenched. Our toes found tepid hot water bottles and our fingers silk bags of old lavender inside the pillows. An owl hooted, wings brushed the window. I remembered the London sounds of distant trains and motor cycles, the breaking limbs of the mountain ash, next door’s dog, the droning radio, the fifth stair groaning and the ten-thirty throat-clearing; I remembered the familiar wallpaper where you could paddle a canoe through green rapids or drive a train along sweeping cuttings … We sobbed in awful desolation.”
Most evacuees were drawn from the underclass, and shocked rustic hosts by their rags and anarchic habits: urban children, victims of the thirties Depression, were unaccustomed to meals at fixed hours, some even to knives and forks. They were used to subsisting on “pieces”—bread and margarine, fish and chips—eaten on the move, together with tinned food and sweets. They recoiled from soup, puddings and all vegetables save potatoes. Many paraded their alienation by resorting to petty delinquency. The habits of their mothers dismayed staid rural communities: “The village people objected to