Inferno - Max Hastings [48]
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 sixteenth, 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 a few 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, 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 places; they were reinforced by a few hundred Algerian infantry trainees and army stragglers, supported by a handful of tanks. Just before midnight on 18 June, when leading elements of the German cavalry division led by Gen. Kurt Feldt approached Saumur, they were greeted by a barrage of fire. A German officer advanced beside a French prisoner carrying a white flag, in an attempt to parley. But this provoked shots and explosions which killed both men. Thereafter, as German artillery began to bombard Saumur, fierce little battles erupted along the length of the line.
Some of the defenders acted with a heroism no less memorable because it was self-consciously theatrical. A cadet, Jean Labuze, questioned the order to hold until the last, saying despairingly, “One is ready to die, but not to die for nothing.” His officer responded, shortly before himself being killed: “No one dies for nothing. We shall all die for France.” Another officer, at Milly-le-Meugon, roused the parish priest from his bed at midnight in order that his pupils might be shriven before facing death; some 200 took communion in the darkened village church before fighting resumed. The Loire bridges around Saumur were blown by the defenders, and throughout 19 and 20 June, repeated German attempts to cross in small boats were beaten off.
But the invaders instead crossed the river up- and downstream, outflanking Saumur; the last positions held by men of the cavalry school, around a farmhouse at Aunis, three miles southwest of the town, were overwhelmed. Scores of cadets and instructors were wounded or killed, including the former architectural student Jean-Louis Dunand.