Inferno - Max Hastings [41]
Throughout eastern and central France, army units found themselves struggling to deploy for action amid huge columns of desperate humanity. Gustave Folcher wrote:
The people are half-mad, they don’t even reply to what we ask them. There is only one word in their mouths: evacuation, evacuation … What is most pitiful is to see entire families on the road, with their livestock they force to follow them, but that they finally have to leave in some cattle-pen. We see wagons drawn by two, three or four beautiful mares, some with a young foal which follows at the risk of being crushed every few metres. The wagon is driven by a woman, often in tears, but most of the time it’s a kid of eight, ten or perhaps twelve years old who leads the horses. On the wagon, on which furniture, trunks, linen, the most precious things, or rather the most indispensable things, have been hastily packed up, the grandparents have also taken their place, holding in their place a very young child, even a newborn baby … The children look at us one by one as we overtake them, holding in their hands the little dog, the little cat or the cage of canaries they didn’t want to be separated from.
Eight million French people abandoned their homes in the month following the onset of the German assault, the greatest mass migration in western European history. Those families who stayed in Paris found themselves repeatedly driven into shelters by alarms: “They had to dress their children by torchlight,” wrote one of those who experienced them.
Mothers lifted small, warm, heavy bodies into their arms: “Come on, don’t be afraid, don’t cry.” An air raid. All the lights were out, but beneath the clear, golden June sky, every house, every street was visible. As for the Seine, the river seemed to absorb even the faintest glimmers of light and reflect them back a hundred times brighter, like some multi-faceted mirror. Badly blacked-out windows, glistening rooftops, the metal hinges of doors all shone in the water. There were a few red lights that stayed on longer than the others, no one knew why, and the Seine drew them in, capturing them and bouncing them playfully on its waves.
In the week that followed the German crossing of the Meuse, the invading armies maintained an almost ceaseless advance, while the Allies conducted in slow motion every activity save retreat. The British held the French overwhelmingly responsible for their predicament, but some of Gort’s officers adopted a more enlightened view, understanding that their own BEF had little to be proud of. “After a few days’ fighting,” wrote an Irish Fusiliers officer, John Horsfall, “part of our army was no longer capable of coordinated measures, either offensive or defensive … We could not lay these … to the charge of our politicians, [they were] failings that were strictly our own … Within our army the fault lay in the mind, and really one must wonder what the Staff College was about in those pre-war years.”
The disparity between the battlefield performance of the German and Western Allied armies would prove one of the great enigmas not merely of the 1940 campaign, but of the entire conflict. Thomas Mann once described Nazism as “mechanised mysticism.” Michael Howard has written: “Armed as they were with all the military technology and bureaucratic rationality of the Enlightenment, but fuelled by the warrior-values of a largely invented past, it is not surprising that the Germans held the world at bay through two terrible wars.” Though these remarks reflect important