Inferno - Max Hastings [47]
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 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.” Pvt. Ernie Farrow of the British Army’s 2nd Norfolks likewise recoiled from the carnage wrought by Göring’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 to an armistice. Reynaud wrote sadly later, after Portes’s 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’s 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. Edouard Wagner wrote