End of a Nation

ASSIGNMENT TO CATASTROPHE, Vol. II: THE FALL OF FRANCE (333 pp.)--Major-General Sir Edward Spears--A. A. Wyn ($5).

Like "the gavel of fate striking the dome of time," Big Ben struck 1 a.m. In London, General Spears sat alone with Prime Minister Churchill, a "heavy hunched figure in black." At this moment on June 10, 1940, Italy had entered World War II. Churchill began to speak, and "for the first and only time in my experience." writes General Spears, "I heard words akin to despair pass his lips."

The Fall of France, Spears's sequel to his Prelude to Dunkirk, tells the story of June 1940, and is packed with as many characters as a grand opera. But the single figure of heroic stature and stentorian voice is that of Churchill. It is a measure of the author's success that he manages to add still another dimension to the familiar portrait. Ten years after France emerged theoretically victorious from World War II, 15 years after its fall to the Germans, France is still fallen--floundering in a moral and political morass. The record of 1940 tells not only why France was unable to win then, but why it is unable to govern itself today.

The Little Father. Spears, a hussar who speaks French like a native, served as a liaison officer with the French in World War I. When World War II began, Churchill chose Spears as his personal representative to the French government. He became a sort of overloaded Hermes whose duty it was to convey to France the untranslatable fire and fighting passion of his master in Downing Street.

Churchill's opposite number in France, Paul Reynaud, was a man of "innate loyalty and pluck." But the men who stood closest to Reynaud were, in Spears's eyes, a diversity of wet blankets with a single aim--to extinguish the fire in their Premier's heart. The chief among them:

P: Marshal Petain, who, at 84, had come to believe that "age was a major quality." A sort of Little Father to the people of France, he might have seized the "trumpet from the Angel of Victory at the Arc de Triomphe" and blown such a blast as could "awaken France." But Father Petain had no breath to spare for trumpeting. Ever since the German breakthrough and the British evacuation from Dunkirk, his mind had been fixed on the idea of saving France by surrendering to Germany, and when he uttered the word "catastrophe," his voice "sounded satisfied . . . as if he accepted defeat joyfully."

P: General Weygand, then 73, France's CinC, a defeatist of another stamp. Active, shrill, offensive in argument, Weygand believed, like "French professional officers generally," that "their army alone excelled in war, that fundamentally [the British] were not soldiers." It followed that only a lunatic could believe that the British could win against an enemy who had already beaten the French.

P: Admiral Darlan. 58. and General Vuillemin. 57, commanders respectively of the French navy and air force, who were as stolid as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. "Rubicund and nautical," Darlan looked so much like a true sea dog that whenever he gave the impression of being hopelessly at sea in Paris, everyone concluded that this was only because in fact he was so far from the sea. He stood by the unwritten motto of the French navy: Fear God and hate the English--a maxim none could pin on General Vuillemin, who never seemed for or against anything in particular. "His bovine blue eyes had the same expression of rather hostile bewilderment to be observed in oxen as they watch the trains go by."

P: Mme. Helene de Fortes, Reynaud's mistress, who was as damaging to the French cause as any of the men. "She was certainly not pretty"; her voice was that of a "corn crake muffled under an eiderdown," and the hatred in her eyes "swept . . . like the strokes of a scythe." When the French government, just before the fall of Paris, fled to Tours, Spears was astonished to drive up to one chateau and find Mme. de Portes "in a dressing gown over red pyjamas, directing the traffic from the steps of the main entrance." He was still more astonished when a long-lost telegram of great importance was at last handed to him by an aide with the muttered apology: "Chut! It was in Madame de Fortes' bed." Any British visitor was anathema to Madame, who would rush in on the heels of the departing guest and exclaim to Premier Reynaud: "What did he say? What is the sense of going on? Thousands of men are being killed while you hesitate to stop the war."

Hoisted Honor. Slowly but steadily, Reynaud succumbed to the pessimism that closed in on him like an iron hoop. The stoutheartedness of such Frenchmen as De Gaulle, Mandel, Herriot and General Alphonse Georges gave the Premier only temporary shots in the arm. When at last Petain took over only to surrender, it was Spears who, "with hooked hands," leaned suddenly from the plane that was about to take him back to Britain and hoisted De Gaulle on board, in accordance with a prearranged plot. Blank and astonished faces stared upwards from the Bordeaux airport, as the plane sped off, carrying with it, as Churchill has said."the honour of France."

The value of Spears's book is that it fills in the gaps and says bluntly many a harsh truth which the chivalrous Churchill toned down or omitted in his own mammoth history of World War II. The Fall of France is also a gold mine of Churchilliana. Sample: two French officers were breakfasting quietly in a French conference room when they suddenly "beheld an astonishing sight." The double doors burst open and "an apparition which they aid resembled an angry Japanese genie, in long, flowing red silk kimono . . . girdled with a white belt . . . stood there, sparse hair on end, and said with every sign of anger: 'Uh ay ma bain?'" Reminded of this linguistic fall years later, the old man flushed guiltily and said: "I suppose I ought to have said, 'Uh ay MONG bain.'"

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