Peter de Polnay

I recently spent the equivalent of two days listening to the audiobook version of The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 William L. Shirer’s massive follow-up to his classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. At over 1,000 pages, the book will satisfy all but the most obsessive reader’s appetite for the workings of French politics between 1870 and 1940. And if there is one resounding criticism I’d make, it’s that Shirer’s is very much an old-school history. This is history from the top down, as seen (and then exhaustively recounted in memoirs) by the politicians and generals at the highest levels of the government and military. With few exceptions, we get little sense of how the events of May and June 1940 were experienced by ordinary people.

One reason I find this episode fascinating is that it represented, in a matter of weeks, at times even just days, the complete overturn of the status quo of millions. At every level from the individual to the national, things that were taken for granted were torn away or fell apart. For me at least, I cannot read an account from this time without wondering, What would I have done? How would I have reacted? Would I have acted selflessly or heroically? Or panicked and clogged the roads like thousands of other refugees? I hope I never have to learn that answers to these questions, but here is a selection of 12 different ways in which people responded.

• Divided Loyalties: A Scotswoman in Occupied France, by Janet du Tessier Cros

Janet Griegson was a Scotswoman who married François Teissier du Cros, a physicist, in 1930. She found herself in the rural Cevennes region in southern France with her husband on military service in May 1940. In this memoir of her experiences during the war, she recalls first hearing the news of the invasion:

A little beyond Mandiargues some soldiers stopped the bus and came on board. They told us that their leave had been cancelled because at that very moment the Nazi troops were pouring into Holland. A buzz of dismay went through the bus. i sat frozen. Something in my mind was rushing desperately hither and thither, hunting for a way out. There was none. My sister Alice was married to a Dutchman and lived in The Hague. What would become of their children and of themselves? What about François? It was the end, the terrible end I had sensed from the beginning….

• Death and Tomorrow (American title: The Germans Came to Paris)(1942), by Peter de Polnay

Peter de Polnay, a Hungarian-born novelist who wrote in English, was living in Paris and enjoying the best of la vie bohème when war broke out. He first felt himself outside the conflict, and even the start of the Blitzkrieg seemed, at first, of little import:

I went to play bridge in the house of an English friend, and at that bridge party only English and Americans were present. They all said that the French were running; I heard the word running the whole afternoon. Now that the Germans are inside France, I suggested, the running will stop. The answer was that the Stukas and the seventy-ton tanks were invincible. But there was Weygand [the marshal commanding the French army], I said. It was a pretty gloomy afternoon, though nobody quite believed that those tanks were really invincible, it was talking of the devil in the hope that the talk would exorcise him.

Death and Tomorrow is a vivid description of the first days of the German occupation of Paris, enriched by the fact that de Polnay seemed to cross paths — and be trusted — by everyone: Germans, French, collaborators, black marketeers, and Resistance members. Eventually, though, his freewheeling ways attracted the attention of the Gestapo and he was forced to flee, making his way to England, the story of which comprises the second half of his book.

• The Train, by Georges Simenon

Twenty years after the fact, the prolific novelist Georges Simenon wrote one of his best novels — Brigid Brophy called it his masterpiece — about the choices people make when their lives are suddenly disrupted. The story opens as a Belgian couple are fleeing their home to escape the Germans. Familiar with the experience of occupation from the First World War, some of their fellow townspeople have decided to stay:

Other people, like us, were walking towards the station, burdened with suitcases and bundles. An old woman asked me if she might put hers on my cart, and she started pushing it along with me….

There was a rather wild look in most people’s eyes, but that was chiefly the result of impatience. Everybody wanted to be off. It was all a matter of arriving in time. Everybody was convinced that part of the huge crowd would be left behind and sacrificed.

Were those who were not leaving taking greater risks? Behind the window-panes, faces were watching the fugitives, and it seemed to me, looking at them, that they were stamped with a sort of icy calm.

The couple become separated in the evacuation and the husband meets a Czech woman who leads him to reconsider where he wants to go with his life. It’s a classic Simenon story, in which one unexpected accident, one step in the wrong direction, sets off a series of events that overturns everything an individual has taken for granted — rather as the fall of France did on a much larger scale.

• Running to Paradise (1943) and Bid the Soldiers Shoot (1955), by John Lodwick

Finding himself in France at the outbreak of the war, John Lodwick joined the French Foreign Legion and was involved in numerous skirmishes as the French and British armies gave way before the Germans. He wrote about the experience twice: first as a novel with his fictional counterpart Adrian Dormant and again, 15 years later, in a memoir that encompassed his time as a prisoner of war, his escape to England, and his work as an agent for the Special Operations Executive in France and the Balkans.

Both books demonstrate that Lodwick, for all his superficial nonchalance, was a veteran of intense combats. In Running to Paradise, he describes the psychological effects of being attacked by Stuka dive bombers:

Both the precision of their aim and the destruction caused by it were intense. The effect of it was moral as well as material. A bomb takes a certain time to fall, and whistles as it drops. The blast and danger of its explosion are as nothing compared to the agonized suspense of these few moments. A man lying with his belly married to the soil or in the shallow shelter of some hole, feels himself annihilated in advance, a grubby penny lying on the counter of eternity. He cannot see. He dare not raise his head. He can only hear, and since the enemy realize this and know the control which his auditory system exercises on his nerves, they fit sirens to their aeroplane engines — sirens, whose mournful wail, like the last breath of a banshee, shall deafen him and curdle his quaking tripes.

• F.S.P.: An N.C.O.’s Description of His and Others’ First Six Months of War, January 1st–June 1st, 1940, by Arthur Gwynn-Browne (1941)

Gwynn-Browne was an NCO assigned to a Field Security Post (a military police unit) with the British Expeditionary Force deployed to France after the German invasion of Poland. He witnessed, therefore, not only the truce-like “Phony War” but the panic and retreat when the German Panzers began driving through Belgium and France. Gwynn-Browne’s might be considered the first modernist account of World War Two, as his prose style shows the clear influence of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.

In the early days, his unit is assigned to try to manage the masses of refugees filling every passable road leading away from the Germans:

There were hundreds of cars, thousands of refugees. They all looked much the same and one car looked much the same as the next one coming after. On the top there were always the mattresses laid flat on the roof and on them lay blankets pillows eiderdowns rug and these were securely corded and then usually a bicycle and a child’s scooter and sometimes a pram securely corded on top of them. It was hot and dry and it was all right, later on it was cold and wet and then it was not so all right. Inside the cars there was everything the family had and all the women inside all wore little round hats with little veils on them. The children usually there were two or three children they were asleep. There were never any pet animals and the windows were tight shut though it was hot but they were closed. Perhaps it is not kind to say they all looked very bourgeois but they did, they were plump scented and stuffy.

• Europe in the Spring, by Clare Boothe (1940)

Playwright and occasional reporter Clare Boothe (not yet adding husband and Time/Life owner Henry Luce’s name to hers) traveled to Europe in April 1940 expecting to travel around and witness the uneasy stalemate underway since the end of the German and Soviet takeover of Poland. Instead, she found herself caught up in the flight from the German attack, waking up on her first day in Brussels to the news that German troops were crossing into Belgium and German planes bombing its cities and forts. She makes her way to Paris, where she watches as the facade of Parisian sophistication crumbles as the government and army fall apart:

Paris got its information about what France had been doing all day, all night, the way a woman gets hers about what her husband has been up to. You know how a woman says, the split second her husband walks in the door with a carefully arranged smile on his face: “So things have been going badly at the office?” And he says: “My God, how did you know?” And she replies: “Because I know you so well, darling.” That is how Paris, the wife, knew what was happening to France, the husband. All the smiles or frowns on the politicians’ faces when they left their offices, the way military moustaches drooped or bristled at midnight, the inflections of well-known voices saying nothing or something or anything on the radio, on the telephone; the way important. people walked in the street; the way ministry doors were slammed; by the significant silences of a great race of talkers; by a thousand little downward percolating uncensorable gestures and indications, the contagious climate of a mood spread from the top of Paris to the bottom—from clerk to doorman, to domestic, to waiter, to policeman, to taxi-driver, to the people—so that the people of Paris knew from hour to hour how the fate of France fared.

• Assignment to Catastrophe, by Major General Edward L. Spears (1955)

Spears, who grew up in France and had the dual advantages of a fluent mastery of the French language and culture and the trust of Winston Churchill, was appointed as Churchill’s personal representative to French prime minister Paul Reynaud soon after Churchill took over as British prime minister. Assignment to Catastrophe, Spears’ two-volume memoir of the lead-up to the war and of the fall of France, is a fascinating account of the personalities and politics at work in the last days of the Fourth Republic.

Knowing Marshal Pétain from his work as a liaison officer between the British and French forces during World War One, Spears paid a call soon after Pétain’s return from his post as ambassador to Franco’s Spain. He soon realized that the man who was being lauded as the savior of France was senile, ineffectual, and completely unsuited to the task:

Very sadly I said: “What France needs today, Monsieur le Marshal, is another Joan of Arc.” His reaction was startling. Once more he was all animation, his face lit up. “Joan of Arc! Joan of Arc!” he exclaimed, “Have you read my speech on Joan of Arc?” “No, Monsieur le Marechal “Now that is too bad, it should have been sent to you. I made it at Rouen; now when was it, in 1937, ’38? It was an extremely fine speech, I may say. I shall read it to you.”

To my amazement, not to say consternation, he went to some bookshelves between two windows, pulled out one or two bound volumes of typescript, did not find what he wanted, then bent right down to look at the lowest shelves. The effort was considerable, he straightened stiffly, and said: “I shall have it found, it is certainly here,” and, moving back to his desk, rang a bell. In a moment his Chief of Staff, General Bineau, appeared. He was almost as old as his chief (age was a major quality in the Marshal’s eyes) and, I think, very lame.

The problem was explained, and with courteous apologetic haste the General began to hunt for the speech.

It was presently found. “ Je vous remercie ,” said the Marshal, as, adjusting his pince-nez once more, he settled himself in a stiff arm¬ chair with his back to the window.

All I remember about that speech was that it was very, very long and that he read it in a monotone. I cannot recall a single sentence, or even its gist. What I do remember was the terrible sadness I felt as I watched him, a sadness now based on pity for a very old man for whom I had, till so recently, felt the deepest affection and regard. He was infinitely pathetic in his childish satisfaction as he read.

• My First War: An Army Officer’s Journal for May 1940, through Belgium to Dunkirk, by Basil Bartlett (1942)

Like Gwynne-Browne, Basil Bartlett was assigned to an FSP with the B.E.F., but in his case as the commanding officer. My First War is a case study in the incoherence of an army and society in collapse. Macmillan tried to market the book as “British nonchalance and dry humor at its most enchanting,” but what comes across more strongly is a world view consistently failing to take in the magnitude and reality of the chaos it was experiencing.

As his unit approaches Dunkirk, Bartlett asks a Belgian for the name of a good hotel there, “as we’re all tired and feel we’d like a wash and a sleep.” The man looks at him in amazement. He soon discovers why:

Dunkirk was a nasty shock. I knew it had been bombed, but I hadn’t realised quite how seriously. As I entered the town there was a roar of engines overhead. I looked up and saw about thirty pale-green aeroplanes with a black cross on their underwings flying very low above me. There were no airraid shelters to be seen. So I dived down a side-street and hid myself under a stone seat. At that moment the bombs began to fall. Each aeroplane dropped a 500-pound screaming bomb. Then they all scattered hundreds of little delayed-action and incendiary bombs. By a miracle I escaped being hit.
I crawled out feeling rather shaken.

• Strange Defeat, by Marc Bloch

Bloch, one of the leading historians of his time as well as a veteran of World War One, wrote a brief account that combined personal memoir with searching political and social criticism that was published after his execution by the Gestapo in 1944 for his work in the French resistance.

Serving as a fuels officer when his unit was cut off by the German assault in early May, Bloch evaded capture for ten days by disguising himself as … himself:

What, in fact, I did, after standing for a few moments deep in thought on the pavement of that hilly street, was to choose what seemed to me then the simplest, and, in the long run, the safest method of getting away. I went back to the house where I was billeted. There I took off my tunic. My rough serge trousers had nothing particularly military about them. From my landlord, who, with his son, showed, on this occasion, a high degree of courage, I got, without difficulty, the loan of a civilian jacket and tie. Then, after first making contact with an old friend who was a professor at Rennes, I booked a room in one of the hotels. Arguing that the best way to escape being noticed was to retain one’s identity, I put my real name and occupation on the form handed tome by the manager. My grey hairs were sufficient guarantee that no one would suspect the presence of an army officer beneath the outward semblance of so obviously academic a figure?

• The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940, by Lion Feuchtwanger (1941)

Novelist Feuchtwanger and his wife left Germany in 1933 after Hitler came to power, knowing that their status as liberal intellectuals and Jews put them at risk of Nazi persecution. Within two weeks of the German invasion of France in May 1940, however, he was told to report to the internment camp at Les Mille. After several months, he managed to arrange his escape from internment, disguising himself as a woman and making it to Marseilles. There, with the help of American consul Varian Fry, the couple were given passage to New York, where Feuchtwanger wrote this account of his treatment by the Germans.

Feutchwanger wrote of the experience of captivity with thousands of other prisoners in Les Mille:

What I found most difficult about the camp was the fact that one could never be alone, that constantly, day and night, every act, every physical function, eating, sleeping, voiding, was performed in the presence of hundreds of men, men who were talking, shouting, moaning, weeping, laughing, feeding, smacking their lips, wiping their mouths, sweating, smelling, snoring. Yes, we did everything in the most public view, and no one seemed to feel the slightest embarrassment.

• The Fall of Paris, by Ilya Ehrenburg

Ehrenburg spent the late thirties as a Soviet correspondent in Paris (and managed to avoid some of the personal and ethical risks of Stalin’s purges). In response to the fall of France, he quickly wrote a lengthy novel that, like Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy, traced the decay and breakdown of French society and the early impact of the Occupation. In it, he describes the despair of Parisians during the first days under Nazi rule:

All this time the Parisians had been staying indoors. They could not get used to the German soldiers in the streets. In the morning Agnés went shopping. The long queue was silent. The people tried not to think about anything. Searching for a pound of potatoes or a bottle of milk helped to distract their minds. If they talked at all it was about relations who had disappeared one had lost a husband, another a son.

Once an old man in a queue exclaimed: “What about France?”

Nobody answered, but everybody thought: “France is also lost.”

• Troubled Sleep, by Jean-Paul Sartre

In the third volume of his unfinished tetralogy about French society from the Munich crisis of 1938 through the fall of France and the Occupation, The Roads to Freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre follows a group of soldiers as they learn of the Armistice and are rounded up and shipped off to German prison camps. He describes a carload of prisoners watching as the French landscape rolls away from them:

Brunet saw a chateau that was not yet within their range of vision, a chateau in a park, white, and flanked by two pointed towers. A small girl in the park, holding a hoop, stared at them with solemn eyes; it was as though all France, an innocent and outmoded France, through those young eyes was watching them pass. Brunet looked at the little girl and thought of Pétain; the train swept across her gaze, across her own future of quiet games and healthy thoughts and trivial worries, on toward fields of potatoes and factories and armament works, on to the dark, real future of a world of men. The prisoners behind Brunet waved their hands; in all the cars Brunet saw hands waving handkerchiefs; but the child made no response, she only stood there clasping her hoop.