The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [42]
A strange-looking man, enormously tall; sitting at the table he dominated everyone else by his height, as he had done when walking into the room. No chin, a long, dropping, elephantine nose over a closely cut moustache, a shadow over a small mouth whose thick lips tended to protrude as if in a pout before speaking, a high, receding forehead and pointed head surmounted by sparse black hair lying flat and neatly parted.56
To this weirdly angular giraffe of a man was to be entrusted the honour of la France éternelle.
Churchill and de Gaulle tried to breathe fire into the Council, with the Prime Minister promising a second BEF that would fight in Normandy, reinforced by troops from Narvik, and hoping that France might survive until the spring of 1941 when a reconstituted British Army of twenty-five divisions would come to her aid. Yet it was patently clear that the fight had gone out of the French High Command, several of whose members saw the Dunkirk evacuation as a betrayal worse than that of Belgium. At Tours on 13 June – his final visit – Churchill refused to release France from her promise not to make a separate peace with Germany, and three days later he even proposed a scheme by which France and Britain would be fused into a single political entity, becoming one indivisible country. Pétain dismissed the idea, asking why France should wish to ‘fuse with a corpse’. Later in the war Churchill admitted that France’s refusal of the offer was ‘the narrowest escape we’d had’, because such a union ‘would have impeded us in our methods completely’.57 It nonetheless showed how desperate he had been for France to stay in the war.
Charles de Gaulle, who escaped from France with Spears on Sunday, 16 June, issued a proclamation to the French people two days later in which he said: ‘France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war!’ Although few people heard this historic appeal, and even fewer had ever heard of him beforehand, once the inspiring words of the then obscure tank expert and now junior War Minister were disseminated widely, they formed the rallying cry for the Free French movement. ‘I ask you to believe me when I say that the cause of France is not lost,’ he said. ‘Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and shall not die.’ A fortnight’s experience in a relatively junior government post, and a fortuitous surname that sounded more like a nom de guerre than a baptismal reality, were slim enough justifications for the proclamation that ‘I, General de Gaulle, a French soldier and military leader, realize that I now speak for France.’ For this magnificent act of treason, he was condemned to death in absentia by a Vichy court.
The speed with which France fell shocked everyone, even the Germans. On 14 June, General Bogislav von Studnitz led the German 87th Infantry Division through the streets of a largely deserted Paris. The next day, as Verdun fell, Panzer Group Guderian and Colonel-General Friedrich Dollmann’s Seventh Army surrounded near the Swiss border 400,000 Frenchmen of the Third, Fifth and Eighth Armies, who surrendered en masse. On 18 June – Waterloo Day – the Second British Expeditionary Force, commanded by Sir Alan Brooke, re-embarked for Britain. Brooke himself boarded the trawler Cambridgeshire at Saint-Nazaire, and he twice had physically to restrain the ship’s stoker, who was having a mental breakdown. In all 192,000 Allied troops arrived back in British ports from this second evacuation, so that, between mid-May and 18 June 1940, a total of 558,032 troops came to Britain from different ports of the Continent, 368,491 of whom – two-thirds – were British.58 The 110,000 French troops landing in Britain from Dunkirk were disarmed on arrival. ‘As we disembarked,’ reported an outraged Lieutenant Scalabre, ‘my revolver was taken from me and not returned despite my protests.’ Of these soldiers, who were sent back to Cherbourg and Brest only a few days later, fewer than half saw any active service before the armistice.59