Part 23

It was not necessary, as I have already noted above, to transform all or even a majority of the officers of the French General Staff, into accomplices in order to provoke a French defeat. If in a big business, a few accountants, an assistant cashier, the head of the sales department, and one or two keymen in the stock department took part in a conspiracy to ruin the firm, their simultaneous coordinated sabotage would inevitably achieve their aim--and with particular ease if the organization of the company were faulty.

There were some faults with the French Army, certainly. Was morale unsatisfactory? Was equipment inadequate? Undoubtedly, but the situation in these respects was not strikingly different from that of 1914-1918. The decisive factor seems to have been faults in the high command--important information regarding the movements of the enemy was not relayed in time, orders to army corps suffered considerable delays, the supply service left equipment and matériel of all sorts in the depots instead of sending it to strategically important points. From June 13 on, troops in good fighting shape received everywhere mysterious orders for retreat which puzzled them most of all, at the same time that French statesmen were hearing from French generals (most of them may have spoken with complete good faith), that all troops were fleeing in disorder. Confusion was so great and news of the retreat so unexpected that nobody thought to investigate the hidden causes of the disaster.

Shortly after the armistice, the same announcement was repeated in French by the Stuttgart radio several evenings in succession. It was this: “Frenchmen, in a few days we will give you the name of an outstanding countryman of yours who was our principal agent in France, and who helped to bring about your defeat.”

Everyone in the French unoccupied zone either heard this broadcast or heard about it. There was naturally a good deal of guessing as to the name that would be given by the Germans. For my part, I made a bet that no name would ever be given by Stuttgart. My reasoning was this: That there was such a man or men I didn’t doubt for an instant. But I didn’t doubt also that he had not expected the terrible armistice conditions imposed upon France. He had led his country into what he had thought would be a fake defeat on the basis of his confidence in the honesty of the Germans. By then he had discovered that they were not honest, and that it was a real defeat that had been inflicted upon the country. He saw that the Nazis intended to treat the country with all the severity of genuine conquerors, and that he and his friends had been dupes.

I supposed then, that this man had tried to force the Germans to live up to their promises and to treat France as an ally. He would have pointed out that the new Pétain government had turned against England, as had been agreed. And he would have threatened to reveal everything if Germany did not hold to her bargain, thus ending the acceptance of defeat on the part of the French people by letting them know that they had not in fact been militarily defeated.

Germany’s answer was the Stuttgart broadcast. Her French agent had tried to threaten her. She simply returned the blackmail, reminding him forcefully that the Reich no longer cared whether the French people knew how it had been defeated or not, since the Army was disbanded, the strategic points occupied, and the people helpless to resume the fight. He was reminded also what his own position would be if the story came out. He saw that he had to keep silence to save himself, and the Germans, perfectly willing that silence should be kept, never honored their promise to reveal his name.

It was on the basis of this theory that I expected in advance that the Stuttgart radio would not follow up its announcement. Since it did not, I feel justified in assuming that the reasoning which enabled me to arrive at a correct prediction was probably correct itself.

As if to confirm all this, Pétain himself later made a very mild speech in which he timidly asked the Germans whether they intended to accept the new France as a full-fledged partner in the reconstruction of Europe. France’s new rulers have kept all the promises they had given the Germans. They have cut off relationships with England, dissolved the Freemasons, attacked the Jews, delivered up anti-Hitler German refugees, fought the British at Oran, Dakar, and in Syria. They have slavishly obeyed Hitler’s commands and now they are naively surprised because Hitler has not kept his promise to free France and make her independent again. With the true psychology of a dupe they had believed that Hitler might fool others, but never themselves.

_That ends the statement of my French friend._

* * * * *

Q. _How would you sum up Pétain? Is he a patriot or a traitor, or misguided, or what?_

A. He is first of all a very old, too-old man. Only a man who had lost his judgment could surrender his country to Hitler as Hindenburg did and as Pétain did, both under a profound misconception of Hitler. Pétain is intensely religious and identifies Communism with anti-Christ, the only enemy, failing to perceive that the most powerful foe of Christianity to appear on earth since Christ lived is Hitler. It is a mistake to call Pétain a Fascist; he is a medievalist. He believes the principal goal of life is to prepare for the other world, and the man who can do that best is the man whose activity is closest to nature, the peasant, and the man whose mind is not confused by learning, the illiterate peasant. Therefore he wants a France of uneducated, devout peasants; he does not mind at all the plan of Hitler to abolish French industry.

He is a defeatist at heart; the affairs of this earth are not worth fighting for. It is on record that at Verdun he several times wished to surrender. As a defeatist he believes in superior force and can be as ruthless when he is in possession of it as he can be submissive when he has lost it. His suppression of the mutinies in the French Army was notoriously harsh; the statistics of the killed have yet to be published. He accepts the French birth rate as a fact of superior force to which France must bow and his experience of the bloodletting at Verdun reinforced his conviction that France ought not to try to maintain a predominant place in Europe.

As an old man his vivid memories are of the past, and Germany, though marching under the pirate swastika, remained for him in 1940 the Germany which let France off lightly in 1871. He once told a friend how impressed he was with the behavior of the German commander at Verdun who allowed French officers to retain their swords after one of the surrenders of Douaumont. In this venerable confidence that he was dealing with gentlemen, he gave up. The most pathetic words uttered in this war were those of Pétain when he addressed his petition for an armistice to Hitler with the words, “I speak as soldier to soldier.”

Q. _Why was that pathetic; isn’t Hitler a soldier?_

A. Yes, indeed, but the meaning of the old marshal’s words was, “I speak to you as gentleman to gentleman,” and that is the most pathetic sentence of the war, because it contains the utter failure of the French to understand that not only is Hitler not a gentleman, but Hitler would be the first indignantly to repudiate a title he despises. The code of a gentleman is derived from the Christian code, which Hitler and his Nazi-Nietzchean followers despise. They curse Christ as a Jewish weakling whose religion is for slaves. They spit upon the elementary idea of fair play. A group of devoted young Nazis, a dozen strong, who have just beaten to death a crippled Jew, will be clear of conscience, joyful as though they had done a good deed, and utterly unable to understand the American or British notion that it is not even enjoyable sport to attack with odds of twelve to one. It is sport to them. Pétain had not the faintest notion that the sons of the Germans he had known had come to this. So with his eyes closed, and dreaming of the past, he accepted the promise of a position for France of junior partner to Germany.

Q. _Is Pétain moved by personal ambition?_

A. He is consumed by it. He did not accept with reluctance the post of “Chief of the Government” after Reynaud fell, but gladly, feeling that he had finally received the recognition denied him when Foch was made Commander in Chief. He does not consider himself a Fuehrer or a Duce. He is much nearer the position of his fellow clericalist, the _caudillo_, Franco, who never clearly understood the meaning of Nazism and was repelled by what he did understand.

Pétain does not understand Fascism or Nazism but only sees that they control the mob, and he wishes above all to see the mob controlled as an army, to be drilled and disciplined into hardworking, God-fearing Frenchmen, obedient in civil as in religious life. His religious feeling dominates all his actions. In Bordeaux, the day Reynaud resigned, I was told Pétain’s words as he heard the debacle was reaching its end: “France must suffer for her sins!” Mystically he surrendered, and mystically he still exclaimed a year later to a nation which had endured twelve months of injury and abasement with no prospect of relief, “You are suffering and must suffer for a long time still because we have not yet paid for all our mistakes.”

To the old Marshal, France’s troubles began with the Revolution of 1789, and to cure them he wants to take France back to the Ancien Regime. He wants to do away with liberty, because liberty is synonymous with license and license with sin. Theoretically he is a monarchist, but now that he has become Regent, like Horthy of Hungary, he does not want a king. This period Pétain regards as France’s purgatory, which he gladly endures, confident of a better world. Many Frenchmen recognize Pétain’s good intentions but do not believe they will save him from Hell.

Q. _Why, if the Germans have such a hold over Pétain, have they not forced him to surrender the French fleet and to give them the use of the North African naval and air bases? If Pétain is in fear of being revealed by the Germans as one who helped bring about the French defeat, why can’t the Germans get anything they want from him?_

A. First, because Pétain is more useful to the Germans than the French fleet and the North African bases. Who else could lead so many of the French people to submit and collaborate as they are doing today under Pétain? Pétain does Hitler’s work for him. Pétain coaxes the plunder from the French people in the form of taxes and hands it to Hitler in the form of payment for maintenance of the army of occupation. If the Germans ever exposed him, he would lose his position and they would lose their most useful servant.

Second, the more time that elapses since the armistice, the less effective is the German blackmail threat on Pétain, because as time passes people become less interested in what happened, and as experience with the Germans deepens, fewer people can be found to believe any German explanation.

Third, Pétain, with all his senility, must have realized that it is not nearly as certain now that Germany will win, as it was when he surrendered. The Russian resistance, much as Pétain hates and despises Bolshevism, must have made him think; and the growing belligerence of America must have had some effect upon him. As he becomes less and less convinced that Germany is certain to win he should logically become less submissive to the Germans. On the other hand, he is not likely to revolt openly until he is convinced Germany will lose; and the only way to give him such conviction is for the United States to enter the war.

Q. _What would Hitler do if he finally tired of fooling with Vichy?_

A. He would simply march in and occupy all of France. He could do it with a handful of divisions, since the French have been totally disarmed or at least as fully disarmed as it was possible for the Germans to do. But from then on he would have the trouble of administering the whole country and collecting the taxes which Pétain collects for him now. I do not think he is anxious to increase his responsibilities that way now. Pétain knows this too, and that stiffens the old man’s backbone a little. Essentially though the Vichy attitude will always depend on the question who is going to win the war. I should think that when the defeat of Hitler is assured, the Vichy government may be overthrown and another or Free French, de Gaulle government may re-enter the war on our side. Pétain and Darlan it seems to me are too compromised ever to do that.

Q. _What about Darlan?_

A. Darlan undoubtedly sees more clearly than Pétain, but he is less honorable; indeed I have heard highly placed Englishmen who knew him intimately curse him with concentrated bitterness as the vilest traitor of the lot. Few people would describe Pétain as consciously dishonorable. Few of the men around Pétain are spared the charge by Frenchmen who know them best.

Darlan has no respect from anybody. He has been all his life a political sailor, having had his start from his father, one-time Minister of Justice. His politics were consistently opportunistic. Today he helps head a government that has suppressed Freemasonry; yet he was a Freemason when to be a Freemason was an asset. He helps keep Leon Blum in confinement; yet he supported Blum when Blum was in power. He is now the fiercest advocate of fighting England; yet until Reynaud fell he supported the policy of moving the government to North Africa and carrying on.

He switched when he perceived the chance of becoming head man in the appeasement government. His change of heart was literally overnight. In London immediately after the fall of France, an old friend of mine, an officer of the French Navy whose ship had broken away and come to England, told me Darlan had issued an order to all vessels of the Navy that with the signing of the Armistice they should make for French African or other friendly ports and prepare to go on with the war; twenty-four hours later another code message from Darlan countermanded the order and directed all ships to make for French ports. In the interval Darlan had been promised a seat next to the Chief of the Vichy State.

Nothing in Darlan’s record indicates that he has ever acted except for the purpose of furthering his career; he is characterized by the French as the perfect careerist, and the word has even less flattering connotations in French than in English. The one instinct in him which seems to have persisted without variance is his hatred of the British, based upon the centuries-old rivalry of the French and British navies. While the French were in the war we Americans forgot that the memory of Trafalgar is for the French Navy, or for its older officers anyway, stronger than the memory of the four years of Franco-British comradeship on the battlefields of 1914-1918.

In Darlan this feeling was always strong. At the London Naval Conference of 1930 he fought for parity with the British, but they refused it to him, with a prescience blessed by the event. Suppose the French had possessed as powerful a navy as the British when the French Army fell and Darlan had commanded a force able to challenge the British! After the Battle of Oran, July 3, 1940 when the British, rightly suspecting the intentions of Darlan, attempted to disable the French Fleet at Mers-el Kebir in order to prevent its falling into the hands of the Germans, Darlan led the outcry against the “perfidious” assault. The British are convinced that if ever the chance comes Darlan will use every means in his power to injure them. Whatever his motives may have been at the beginning for joining the capitulation, Darlan like most of the men of Vichy has by now so compromised himself with the French people that, as one French friend of mine expressed it: “If Germany is defeated the best these men of Vichy could hope for would be dishonorable, furtive retirement, but I think most of them would be killed.”

And if Germany wins? For a while Darlan and his colleagues seemed to feel confident that Hitler would be good to them, but now he exclaims: “If we do not get an honorable peace, if France is cut up into many departments and deprived of important overseas territories, and enters diminished and bruised into the New Europe, it will not recover and our children will live in the misery and hatred which breed war.” These words of the appeaser indicate that he has already discerned the outlines of the fate Hitler has in store for France; yet what is the alternative for him and those like him now? Free Frenchmen declare the alternative is death, as traitors.

Q. _And Laval?_

A. He is wounded but he is surely enjoying himself because for the moment he can say, “I told you so.” He is probably the world’s most delighted observer of the Battle of Russia. My last glimpse of him was in Bordeaux at the restaurant “Chapon Fin” the night France capitulated. The restaurant was crowded with the wealthy, the powerful, the noted and notorious of France. The door was locked; without an introduction from at least a Cabinet Minister or a millionaire nobody could get in. That night ten thousand refugees were pounding for admission to the restaurants of Bordeaux. Our Ambassador to Poland, Tony Biddle, unmarked from his harrowing escape across Poland under Luftwaffe machine-gun fire, and as fresh here at the collapse of the world as though he were attending a bridge party at home, rescued us and with a gesture which implied we were all ambassadors, requisitioned a table for our party of American newspapermen. From one corner Otto of Habsburg greeted us in his cordial democratic way. He was one victim Hitler would have liked to catch. I looked around the grotesque dining room, decorated as an artificial rock garden of papier-mâché and now populated by as queer a throng as ever assembled to dine at the funeral of a nation. Nearly every French politician I had ever seen was there, most of them drinking copiously of the wine for which the city was famous. There was no gloom perceptible; not among the Frenchmen. The atmosphere was excited, laughter was frequent and high-pitched. Perhaps it was bravery; the gay talk and conviviality sounded very courageous or else very frivolous at that moment. Who could have realized that there were Frenchmen there calculating to improve their careers by the fall of their country? We American newspapermen looked more depressed than any of the men whose motherland was about to be strangled. Presently a waiter brought me a note from Laval inviting me to his table. I had not seen him enter. There he was, swarthy, ebony-haired, with his famous white string tie, presiding over a company of half a dozen friends, all talking, as everybody in the Western World was talking, about the fate of France.

Abruptly Laval asked, “What do you think, M. Knickerbocker?”

I spoke with all the emphasis I could muster and placing my fist on the table to help express my sincerity talked directly to him: “Mr. President, I think that if you give up, if you surrender, it will mean the end of France as a nation, the end of France forever unless another, outside power comes to your rescue. But Mr. President, if you go on fighting, if you refuse to surrender, even if you have to go to North Africa and base your government on Morocco, then France will live because she and her friends will win this war, however long it may take. But please believe me, Mr. President, when I say I know what the Nazis mean to do to France, and I know because I have lived for nine years in Germany as a professional observer and I know Adolf Hitler, and the Nazis, and the German people better than I know any politician, or political party, or people in the world, and I know they mean the utter destruction of France.”

There was dead silence, and to my gratification everybody at the table, all of Laval’s friends, nodded in agreement with me, but M. Laval himself, grave as a judge, leaned back and with that inscrutable Moorish air of his said, “No, M. Knickerbocker, you do not understand. Hitler does not want to destroy France; Hitler only wants to destroy the Soviet Union.”

That was Laval’s belief, and because this belief was shared by so many other Frenchmen, it became one of the principal reasons for the fall of France.

Whatever else one may think of him, Laval has guts and is no hypocrite. He hates democracy and says so. He is out to promote the fortunes of M. Laval and admits it. He calls himself a realist; and realistically he long ago estimated the strength of France as inadequate to stand up against Germany. He learned to hate Britain during those long years when every French move to bolster their position against the doubly powerful Reich was checked by an imbecile British Foreign Office which continued to think that the balance of power required a stronger Germany and a weaker France. So Laval’s belief in the desirability of a Franco-German “understanding” was not born of defeat alone.

He was the first French Premier to visit Germany after the war. I was in Berlin when he arrived in the autumn of 1931 with the aging and feeble but still brilliant Briand, then Foreign Minister. Bruening was Chancellor and that farsighted benevolent statesman, whom the Allies could have helped suppress the growing menace of Hitler, wished to make the visit the foundation for a new era of Franco-German friendship. How futile his hopes were came to light as the train bearing the French ministers rolled in. I was standing with a small crowd of Germans at the foot of the steps of the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof, and noticed that the streets had been cleared and roped off all the way to the Hotel Adlon. Masses of police manned the ropes but there was almost no crowd to hold back. Around the station were about five hundred people. I noticed they looked curiously alike, as though all from the same neighborhood, the same class. Presently I saw a friend, a plain-clothes man from Police Headquarters, all dressed up in his Sunday best, with gloves and a derby hat and the inevitable big detective’s shoes. I greeted him. He introduced his wife and children. A little surprised, I asked if he were such a great advocate of Franco-German friendship that he had brought his whole family to cheer the visitors from Paris. “_Ja wohl!_” he replied. “Orders, you see. They sent us all down here. Everybody here is from Police Headquarters, _mit Frau und Kinder_. Nobody else; no outsiders. We get a day off for coming.” Sure enough, that was the makeup of the entire crowd. They dutifully thronged around the steps and shouted “_Hoch Frankreich!_” Laval and Briand then passed through empty streets to the Hotel Adlon where another group of policemen and their wives and children cried “_Hoch!_” again. And that was the length and breadth and depth of Franco-German friendship.

Q. _Has Laval a chance to come back?_

A. Yes, if the Germans win he has the best of chances. Laval today is the only master politician left in France; Pétain is senile; Darlan is ward-heel size; none of the others in the Vichy camp is even that large, and the politicians of the Republic are dead and buried. Laval is the best-hated Frenchman alive; the shots fired into him by Colette were cheered from one end of France to the other, but he is still the only Frenchman capable of ruling France as a dictator.