Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

mistress, Comtesse Hélène de Portes. She shamelessly interfered in matters of state – on one occasion the draft of a top-secret telegram to President Roosevelt had to be retrieved from her bed. But worst of all, she had managed to persuade her lover to appoint several defeatists as ministers. They were to bring him down.
    Impressed by de Gaulle’s certainty and vigour, as well as by his predictions about the course of events, Reynaud had just made him Under-Secretary of State for War against much opposition. Yet in mid-May, Reynaud had already felt obliged to recall Pétain from his post as ambassador to General Franco in Madrid and offer him the vice-presidency of the Council of Ministers.
    Philippe Pétain in old age was still wrapped in the reputation he had made at Verdun. The memory of his rallying cry – ‘
They shall not pass!
’– was enough to moisten the eyes of veterans. But he had no stomach for this fight and was openly advocating an armistice with the Germans before the French army fell to pieces completely. Already there had been reports of troops refusing to obey orders. Weygand shared his fears. ‘Ah!’ he is supposed to have sighed. ‘If only I could be sure the Germans would leave me enough men to maintain order.’
    Neither of them had forgotten the mutinies of 1917 which followed the disastrous offensive on the Aisne. French commanders, alarmed by the disintegration of the tsarist army and the recent revolution in Petro-grad, had repressed the disturbances mercilessly. Pétain had then been given the task of reforming the army and bringing it back to discipline. His admirers saw him as the man who had saved France from Bolshevism.
    The conference was to take place in the dark dining roomof the château, where a long table had been prepared. Reynaud, a short man whose intelligent face was a little too well nourished to be described as foxy, called his colleagues together in the hall to greet their allies. The pressure he was under made him nervous and irritable. De Gaulle, one of the most junior members present, stood in the background. He would take his place at the far end of the table when they sat down.
    Churchill had left England in a very bad temper and was dressed in one of his old-fashioned black suits despite the summer heat, yet he entered the room looking rubicund and genial. He was followed by Anthony Eden; General Sir John Dill; Major-General Hastings Ismay, the Secretary of the War Cabinet; and Major-General Edward Spears, his personal representative to the French government. Spears felt that, despite Reynaud’s polite welcome, their presence was like that of ‘poor relations at a funeral reception’.
    Weygand, at Reynaud’s request, gave a description of the current military situation: it was relentlessly pessimistic. He ended with the words: ‘
C’est la dislocation!
’
    Churchill, in a long, passionate speech full of historical allusions and expressed in his inimitable mixture of French and English, recalled the disasters of the First World War from which the Allies had recovered and won: ‘We would fight on and on –
toujours,
all the time – everywhere,
partout – pas de grâce,
no mercy.
Puis la victoire!
’ Unaware of Weygand’s decision to abandon Paris, he urged the defence of the capital withhouse-to-house fighting. Churchill’s further suggestion of continuing the struggle by guerrilla warfare – one of his pet subjects – horrified Pétain even more. His face briefly came to life. It would mean ‘the destruction of the country’, he muttered angrily. He was convinced that this loosening of the chain of command would lead to the anarchy that he and Weygand feared so much.
    General Weygand, in his baffled anger, was attempting to shift the responsibility for France’s humiliation away from the French army. He and his kind bitterly blamed everything they loathed – the Popular Front government of 1936, liberals, Communists, anti-clericalism, freemasonry and now, it seemed, their allies for having started the war. No criticism of the French general staff could be considered.
    The commander-in-chief evaded the issue of continuing the struggle by other means. He repeated that they were ‘at the last quarter of an hour’ of the battle and persisted in demanding every available British fighter squadron. The British were not prepared to transfer any more Hurricanes or Spitfires from home defence, especially when they doubted the will of the French