Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [33]
De Gaulle, Reynaud’s army minister, almost alone among prominent Frenchmen, chose to pitch camp in London, and secured the evacuation of his wife. The War Cabinet opposed his request that he should be permitted to broadcast to his people on the BBC. Churchill, however, urged on by Spears, insisted that the renegade—for so de Gaulle was perceived by many of his own people—should be given access to a microphone. De Gaulle’s legal adviser, Professor Cassin, enquired of his new chief what the status was of his embryo movement in Britain. De Gaulle answered magnificently: “We are France!101 … The defeated are those who accept defeat.” The general had an answer, too, to the problem of establishing his own stature: “Churchill will launch me like a new brand of soap.” The British government indeed hired an advertising agency, Richmond Temple, to promote Free France. De Gaulle would need all the help he could get. Few Frenchmen, even those evacuated to Britain from the battlefield, were willing to fight on if their government quit. While travelling as a passenger on the French destroyer Milan, de Gaulle asked its captain if he would serve under British colours. The naval officer answered that he would not. Most of his compatriots proved like-minded. “Mr. Churchill finds that there are not enough French102 and German bodies to satisfy him,” declared a sulphurous front-page editorial in the Paris paper Le Matin, in one of its first issues after the surrender. “We ask if the British prime minister has lost his head. If so, what a pity that our ministers did not perceive it sooner.” The paper went on to denounce de Gaulle, and to accuse the British of fomenting revolt in France’s overseas empire.
In 1941 and 1942, the prime minister would be obliged to preside over many British defeats and, indeed, humiliations. Yet no trauma was as profound, no shock as far-reaching, as that which befell him in his first weeks of office, when the German army destroyed France as a military power and swept the British from the Continent. Henceforward, the character of the war became fundamentally different from that of 1914–18. All assumptions were set at naught upon which Allied war policy, and Churchill’s personal defiance of Hitler, had been founded. Whatever Britain’s continuing capabilities at sea and in the air, since September 1939 it had been taken for granted that the British Army would confront the Nazi legions alongside the French, in the frankly subordinate role demanded by its inferiority of numbers—just ten divisions to ninety-four French on the Western Front. The British Army could never alone aspire to dispute a battlefield with the Wehrmacht, and this knowledge dominated British strategy.
It was hard for many people, even the highest in the land, to absorb the scale of the disaster which had befallen Allied arms, and which now threatened to overwhelm Britain. Alan Brooke was struck by a Churchillian observation about human nature. The prime minister said that the receptive capacity of a man’s mind was like a three-inch pipe running under a culvert. “When a flood comes the water flows over103 the culvert whilst the pipe goes on handling its 3 inches. Similarly the human brain will register emotions up to its ‘3 inch limit’ and subsequent additional emotions flow past unregistered.” So it now seemed to Brooke himself, and to a host of others. They perceived that a catastrophe was unfolding, but their hearts could not keep pace with the signals from their brains about its significance. Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary on June 15: “My reason tells me that it will now be104 almost impossible to beat the Germans, and that the probability is that France will surrender and that we shall be bombed and invaded … Yet these probabilities do not fill me with despair. I seem to be impervious both to pleasure and pain. For the moment we are all anaesthetised.”
Another eyewitness, the writer Peter Fleming, then serving as an army staff officer, identified the same emotional confusion: “This period was one of carefree105 improvisation as far as