Inferno - Max Hastings [40]
By nightfall on 14 May three French formations around Sedan had collapsed, their men fleeing the battlefield. One of these was the 71st Division. A notorious episode passed into legend, of one of its colonels who sought to check fleeing men and was swept aside by soldiers crying: “We want to go home and get back to work! There is nothing to do! We are lost! We are betrayed!” Some modern historians question the reality of this incident. Pierre Lesort, another officer of the same formation, retained a different and more heroic memory of the day: “I saw very well, about 800–1000 metres on my left, an artillery battery … which never stopped firing at the diving Stukas which ceaselessly attacked it; I can still see the little round clouds which its guns created in the sky around the swirling planes which continuously dispersed and returned … As for the reactions of the machine-gunners in my company, we never stopped shooting desperately at the planes.” Yet Lesort acknowledged the progressive erosion of morale: “It must be said that this control of the sky by the Germans for these two days made the men discontented and impatient. At the start it was just a sort of grumbling: ‘Christ, there are only German planes, what the hell are ours doing?’ But on the following days … one felt the growth of a kind of helpless resentment.”
Through the succeeding days, French armour launched desultory attacks on the Meuse bridgehead from the south. Gamelin and his officers made another disastrous and probably irrecoverable mistake: they failed to grasp the fact that von Rundstedt’s spearheads did not intend to continue their advance west into the heart of France, but instead were racing north, for the sea, to cut off the British and French armies in Belgium. The Germans’ “expanding torrent” was now advancing across a front sixty miles wide. The French Ninth Army, charged with defending the region, had almost ceased to exist. The advancing panzer columns were acutely sensitive to the risk of an Allied counterattack on their flanks, but the French high command lacked the will or the grip to initiate such action, as well as means to carry it out. It is mistaken to suppose that the French army offered no significant resistance to the German offensive in 1940: some of Gamelin’s units made energetic and successful local attacks, and paid a heavy price in casualties. But nowhere did the French deliver assaults of sufficient weight to halt the racing thrusts of von Rundstedt’s armour.
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,