Books: End of a Nation

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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:

¶ Marshal Pétain, 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 Pétain 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."

¶ 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.