on the grass nearby, he stared at his hands ‘with unbelieving terror…The skin hung from them like long icicles. The fingers were curled and pointed, like the claws of a great wild bird – distorted, pointed at the ends like talons, ghostly thin. What would I do now? What use would be these paralysed talons to me for the rest of my life?’
By nightfall on the 14th three French formations around Sedan had collapsed, their men fleeing the battlefield. One of these was the 71st Division. A notorious episode passed into legend, of one of its colonels who sought to check fleeing men and was swept aside by soldiers crying: ‘We want to go home and get back to work! There is nothing to do! We are lost! We are betrayed!’ Some modern historians question the reality of this incident. Pierre Lesort, another officer of the same formation, retained a different and more heroic memory of the day: ‘I saw very well, about 800–1000 metres on my left, an artillery battery…which never stopped firing at the diving Stukas which ceaselessly attacked it; I can still see the little round clouds which its guns created in the sky around the swirling planes which continuously dispersed and returned…As for the reactions of the machine-gunners in my company, we never stopped shooting desperately at the planes.’ Yet Lesort acknowledged the progressive erosion of morale: ‘It must be said that this control of the sky by the Germans for these two days made the men discontented and impatient. At the start it was just a sort of grumbling: “Christ, there are only German planes, what the hell are ours doing?” But on the following days…one felt the growth of a kind of helpless resentment.’
Through the succeeding days, French armour launched desultory attacks on the Meuse bridgehead from the south. Gamelin and his officers made another disastrous and probably irrecoverable mistake: they failed to grasp the fact that von Rundstedt’s spearheads did not intend to continue their advance west into the heart of France, but instead were racing north, for the sea, to cut off the British and French armies in Belgium. The Germans’ ‘expanding torrent’ was now advancing across a front sixty miles wide. The French Ninth Army, charged with defending the region, had almost ceased to exist. The advancing panzer columns were acutely sensitive to the risk of an Allied counter-attack on their flanks, but the French high command lacked the will or the grip to initiate such action, as well as means to carry it out. It is mistaken to suppose that the French army offered no significant resistance to the German offensive in 1940. Some of Gamelin’s units made energetic and successful local attacks, and paid a heavy price in casualties. But nowhere did the French deliver assaults of sufficient weight to halt the racing thrusts of von Rundstedt’s armour.
Pierre Lesort described ‘an immediate impression of total disorder and shameful despair. Belongings pushed on bikes, helmets and guns out of sight, and the appearance of dazed vagrants…By the side of the road a man was standing alone, immobile. Wearing a black cap and short cassock: a military chaplain…I saw that he was crying.’ Another soldier, Gustave Folcher, wrote of encounters with men of broken units from the north: ‘They told us terrible things, unbelievable things…Some had come from as far as the Albert Canal…They asked for something to eat and drink; poor lads! They streamed on endlessly; it was a piteous sight. Ah, if those enthusiasts who go and watch the magnificent military parades in Paris or elsewhere could have seen on that morning this other army, the real one…perhaps they would understand the suffering of the soldier.’
A sense of unreality at first pervaded French public consciousness as the familiar world began to disintegrate. The Russian-born Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky described in her autobiographical novel of 1940–41, Suite française, the disbelieving response in Paris to news of stunning German advances: ‘Even though the reports were terrible, no one believed them. No more so than if victory had been announced.’ But as the truth began to be understood, panic swept the nation. Among the most terrible aspects of those days was the massed flight of civilians, which impacted as disastrously on military communications as upon soldiers’ morale. The people of eastern France had suffered German occupation in 1914; they were determined to escape another such experience. Much of the population of Rheims fled, only one-tenth of Lille’s 200,000 inhabitants stayed in their homes, and just eight hundred of Chartres’ 23,000 people after the cathedral city was heavily bombed. Many places became ghost towns.
Throughout eastern and central France, army units found themselves struggling to deploy for action amid huge columns of desperate humanity. Gustave Folcher wrote:
The people are half-mad, they don’t even reply to what we ask them. There is only one word in their mouths: evacuation, evacuation…What is most pitiful is to see entire families on the road, with their livestock they force to follow them, but that they finally have to leave in some cattle-pen. We see wagons drawn by two, three or four beautiful mares, some with a young foal which follows at the risk of being crushed every few metres. The wagon is driven by a woman, often in tears, but most of the time it’s a kid of eight, ten or perhaps twelve years old who leads the horses. On the wagon, on which furniture, trunks, linen, the most precious things, or rather the most indispensable things, have been hastily packed up, the grandparents have also taken their place, holding in their place a very young child, even a newborn baby…The children look at us one by one as we overtake them, holding in their hands the little dog, the little cat or the cage of canaries they didn’t want to be separated from.
Eight million French people abandoned their homes in the month following the onset of the German assault, the greatest mass migration in west European history. Those families who stayed in Paris found themselves repeatedly driven into shelters by alarms: ‘They had to dress their children by torchlight,’ wrote one of those who experienced them. ‘Mothers lifted small, warm, heavy bodies into their arms: “Come on, don’t be afraid, don’t cry.” An air raid. All the lights were out, but beneath the clear, golden June sky, every house, every street was visible. As for the Seine, the river seemed to absorb even the faintest glimmers of light and reflect them back a hundred times brighter, like some multi-faceted mirror. Badly blacked-out windows, glistening rooftops, the metal hinges of doors all shone in the water. There were a few red lights that stayed on longer than the others, no one knew why, and the Seine drew them in, capturing them and bouncing them playfully on its waves.’
In the week that followed the German crossing of the Meuse, the invading armies maintained an almost ceaseless advance, while the Allies conducted in slow motion every activity save flight. The British held the French overwhelmingly responsible for their predicament, but some of Gort’s officers adopted a more enlightened view, understanding that their own BEF had little to be proud of. ‘After a few days’ fighting,’ wrote Irish Fusiliers officer John Horsfall, ‘part of our army was no longer capable of coordinated measures, either offensive or defensive…We could not lay these…to the charge of our politicians, [they were] failings that were strictly our own…Within our army the fault lay in the mind, and really one must wonder what the Staff College was about in those pre-war years.’
The disparity between the battlefield performance of the German and Western Allied armies would prove one of the great enigmas not merely of the 1940 campaign, but of the entire conflict. Thomas Mann once described Nazism as ‘mechanised mysticism’. Michael Howard has written: ‘Armed as they were with all the military technology and bureaucratic rationality of the Enlightenment, but fuelled by the warrior-values of a largely invented past, it is not surprising that the Germans held the world at bay through two terrible wars.’ Though these remarks reflect important truths, they seem an incomplete answer to the question: why was the Wehrmacht so good? Its senior officers had fought in World War I, but for more than a decade thereafter the German army was almost moribund. It gained no inter-war combat experience. Meanwhile, many British rankers as well as officers participated in low-intensity operations on the North-West Frontier of India, in Irish or colonial skirmishes.
The inescapable conclusion is that the British Army’s role as an imperial gendarmerie impeded its education and adaptation for large-scale war. Brushfire conflicts emphasised the handling of small forces, the regiment as the focus of operations. They demanded limited effort, sacrifice and tactical thinking. Some officers were, in Michael Howard’s words, ‘highly professional within a
