England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  When Général Maxime Weygand, who had been Foch’s Chief of Staff during the 1918 ceremony and now commanded what was left of the French Army, heard the terms from Huntziger on a telephone line laid on by the Germans, he took Hitler at his word. Weygand advised Pétain that the terms were harsh but did not dishonour the 50,000 French soldiers who had fallen during the last six weeks of fighting. France would keep its colonies and the fleet would be immobilized but remain in French ports with skeleton French crews. It could have been a lot worse. All that remained was to get the ships back.

  On 3 July 1940 the Surcouf was still moored at Devonport where her 140–strong crew could not fail to notice that they were covered by the huge 15-inch guns on the British battleship HMS Revenge, which had last fired them in anger at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. It seemed so pointless. It was eleven days since the armistice had been signed. The war was over. Would the English really prevent them going home? They could not possibly continue to fight the most powerful war machine on the planet on their own.

  Alongside them aboard the battleship Paris were 600 or so similarly minded French sailors under Amiral Jean Cayol. A French destroyer and two submarines were also anchored nearby. Few of their crews doubted that the English would be the next to come to terms with Germany. The hundreds of abandoned trucks and artillery pieces the Wehrmacht’s mechanics were now picking over at Dunkirk, from where Lord Gort’s army had been so lucky to get home in their socks, were surely proof enough that the British had no real stomach for a fight with Hitler?

  In the Compiègne forest some of the Germans present had confided to Huntziger’s delegation that they expected London would sue for peace by mid-August. On 1 July Amiral François Darlan, head of the French Navy he had done so much to modernize, was assuring William Bullitt, the US ambassador to France, that Germany would conquer England within five weeks ‘unless she surrendered sooner’.

  Pétain had already rejected an extraordinary proposal from Winston Churchill, who was desperate to keep France in the war, that Britain and France unite to form a single confederated state. ‘It is not in France’s interests to marry a corpse,’ declared the maréchal, 84 last birthday.

  He had been in Madrid as France’s ambassador to Franco’s new Spain when Prime Minister Paul Reynaud had invited him to join his government as Deputy Prime Minister with the expectation that the maréchal would stiffen the resolve of the waverers in the Cabinet who wanted to give in. But to his astonishment he soon discovered that the old soldier who had saved Verdun was equally convinced that the game was up.

  As far as Pétain and a good many less senior officers were concerned, gallant exceptions apart, the French Army was no longer the army they had once served. The sacrifices of the Verdun generation had been blasphemed by the decadence that had rotted the entire nation for most of the last twenty years. It had reached its disgusting highpoint during the leftist government of Léon Blum’s Front Populaire with its anticlericalism and forty-hour weeks for the workers and was reflected in the spinelessness of the army that had collapsed at Sedan. For the British too, he had nothing but contempt. If they had truly possessed the will to fight on they would have met with French demands for massive RAF reinforcements while there was still time to stop the panzers. They might also have sent an army big enough to be worthy of the name; not less than one-tenth of the men France had put in the field.

  All Churchill had to counteract Petain’s defeatism was another of Paul Reynaud’s late appointments to his War Cabinet: Brigadier général Charles de Gaulle, France’s foremost exponent of armoured warfare and as such accorded a certain respect by his contemporaries but unknown to most civilians and hardly the man to take on Pétain, a popular figure bringing an end to an unpopular war. Nonetheless, de Gaulle was the best available. The Francophone British Major General Sir Edward Spears, Churchill’s special emissary to the French government, spirited him away on an RAF aircraft which took off from a chaotically overcrowded airfield at Bordeaux, where the French government had evacuated after an earlier stop in Tours. The aircraft refuelled in Jersey which, along with the rest of the Channel Islands, would shortly become the only British territory to be occupied by Nazi Germany. It was here, Spears observed, that the martyrdom of the général’s exile began when at the airport’s canteen he innocently enquired whether what he was drinking was coffee or tea.

  Five days later de Gaulle, in his first BBC broadcast, announced: ‘France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war.’ His words were primarily intended for the 100,000 or so French military in England who had been evacuated there from Dunkirk and a much smaller contingent from the smaller Anglo-French defeat in Norway. At first these evacuees had expected to be returned to France to fight in the battle being waged on the Somme but now they merely wanted to be back with their families. Very few of them had heard de Gaulle speak. For the most part, homesick poilus – the 1914–18 nickname for the formidable French infantry – and sailors cast up on the wrong side of the Channel were not in the habit of listening to the BBC. And even if they had been it is unlikely that it would have made much difference. The war was over. Ever since it began German propaganda had insisted that London wanted to fight it with French soldiers. Now the British had left France and the French wanted to leave Britain.

  Spears reflected that as a liaison officer in the 1914–18 war, when the French and the English fell out, he always knew that the will to fight Germany was not eroded and these were passing spats. But this time he sensed some irreconcilable break between the two nations. ‘No more perceptible than a crack in crystal but going right through, irreparably. We were no longer one.’

  PART ONE

  The Making and the

  Breaking of the

  Entente Cordiale

  Chapter One

  In the spring of 1903 a new dish began to appear on the menus of the smarter Parisian restaurants. Selle de mouton àl’anglaise was yet another mark of the success of King Edward VII’s recent visit. The Welsh mutton chosen by his accompanying English chef for a dinner held at the British Embassy in honour of President Émile Loubet had only added to the affection France felt for this merry monarch. ‘French cooks are so fond of cutting up joints into morsels and making what they call, “little dishes” of the meat,’ explained the correspondent of the Belfast Newsletter to the beef-eating Protestant gentry. ‘Now every gourmet in Paris wants to have a saddle of mutton for dinner.’

  Edward was no stranger to France or at least to Paris. Queen Victoria’s eldest son and Europe’s best known royal lothario had often visited it, when possible incognito, during his long apprenticeship as Prince of Wales. Among his mistresses had been the great tragédienne Sarah Bernhardt who made her debut at the Théâtre Français.

  In those days his presence had been a nightmare for the French police who feared he might be assassinated by Irish Fenians or some other brand of republican. It never happened in France but in April 1900, the year before he took the throne, the Belgians nearly lost him at Brussels railway station when a teenage gunman missed with two shots before he was overpowered. Jean-Baptiste Sipido, aged 16, was infected by the Anglophobia then widespread on the Continent over the cruel war Imperial Britain was waging against southern Africa’s Boer republics. These proud descendants of Dutch and other continental European settlers were, it was alleged, being treated as if they were no better than unruly Africans. The anti-war movement, which was also gathering strength in Britain, was incensed by a new British tactic of denying the Boer guerrillas their civilian support by concentrating women and children in wired-off and guarded temporary accommodation. There were reports of them dying in their hundreds from typhoid. Offers from Germany and Holland to send medical assistance to these concentration camps, as they were becoming known, had been refused. So had an American proposal to mediate in the conflict.

  Sipido told his interrogators that he wanted to kill the man who would one day wear the crown that was taking so many lives in South Africa. A
s it happened, the very next day, 5 April 1900, one of the latest casualties was Colonel Comte de Villebois-Mareuil, a French aristocrat and distinguished regular officer who had resigned his commission to command a legion of foreign volunteers to the Afrikaner cause. Nor was his loss felt only in France.

  Like many of his class, while the comte’s world view was often Anglophobic his style was distinctly Anglophile: he spoke good English, wore Savile Row, hired his daughter an English governess and was acquainted with the London set who regularly visited Paris, including Oscar Wilde and the Prince of Wales. The comte had met Wilde through their mutual friend, the writer and historian John Bodley, whose two-volume contemporary anatomy of France he was translating for a French publisher.

  Yet Villebois-Mareuil, a veteran of France’s disastrous 1870 war with Prussia as well as colonial triumphs in Morocco and Algeria, had been willing to die for his cause, dug in on a hilltop and rejecting calls for surrender until he was killed by a shell. (Although not before he had shot dead the yeomanry volunteer Sergeant Patrick Campbell whose wife was a famous actress.) Only then did his followers – mostly compatriots in plumed slouch hats who bore themselves as if they were the inventions of Alexandre Dumas – decide they had had enough. Any fears that the English might treat them as little better than mercenaries and have them shot out of hand were soon dispelled. Lord Methuen, the British commander, not only insisted on burying Villebois-Mareuil with full military honours but paid for his headstone and wrote a letter of condolence to his daughter.

  Methuen’s chivalry was appreciated. ‘We are prisoners of an army which is the bravest of the brave,’ reported Comte de Bréda, the fallen hero’s deputy who joined Boer prisoners of war in Napoleonic exile on the island of St Helena. One senses embarrassment on both sides. After nearly a millennium of intermittent warfare, killing each other was no longer quite the norm. ‘For the first time since the Norman Conquest, three generations have gone by without the armies of England and France meeting in battle array,’ wrote Bodley in the work the colonel was meant to be translating.

  But the years since Waterloo in 1815 had not all been ones of peaceful coexistence. King Edward was 60 and in his lifetime this unaccustomed peace with France had rarely been easy. When he was younger it had taken the older generation a long while to get used to it. Forty years after he lost an arm at Waterloo, the fashionably lisping Lord Raglan, then commanding the British contingent of the Anglo-French army in the Crimea, constantly referred to the enemy as ‘the Fwench’ when he meant to say ‘the Wussians’. Nor had time proved a great healer.

  Only five years before Edward’s state visit to Paris, Britain and France had seemed on the brink of war over who should possess Fashoda, the site of an old Arab mud-walled slave-trading fort on the brown and crocodiled waters of Sudan’s Upper Nile. After his brutal victory over the Dervishes at Omdurman, Lieutenant General Sir Horatio Kitchener pushed on upriver to reclaim territory lost thirteen years before when General Charles Gordon had been beheaded at Khartoum and his Egyptian soldiers massacred. When he arrived at Fashoda he discovered its fort was flying the tricolour.

  For the last ten weeks it had been in the hands of about 130 Senegalese soldiers and 8 French officers under the command of the soldier-explorer Commandant Jean-Baptiste Marchand. It had taken Marchand’s expedition almost two years to cross most of the continent from west to east starting at Brazzaville in the French Congo. During that time almost thirty of them had died, not only in the skirmishes they had fought with people who knew they must fear white men, but of malaria and in the accidents that come with unexplored terrain. Jungles, mountains and rivers had all taken their toll. Once, they had spent five days and nights wading through a swamp that was often neck-high. For four months Paris had received no word from them at all and it was feared that, one way or another, Africa had consumed them.

  It was an achievement made even more remarkable by Marchand’s African porters who, with the Nile in mind, had manhandled across their continent the components of a small steam launch, three steel dinghies with sails as well as oars, a hurdy-gurdy that could play the ‘Marseillaise’ and about 2,000 bottles of claret, champagne, brandy and absinthe. All to wash down a staple diet of Anglo-Saxon stodge: 5 tons of canned corned beef and 10 tons of rice.

  For some time both the British and French had the same master plan for their African colonies: where need be this was to expand them until they were contiguous so that one day they could be knitted together by transcontinental railways. Britain wanted to lay its tracks north to south, from Cairo to the Cape via Sudan; France west to east, from Dakar to Somaliland in the Horn of Africa from where a westbound expedition was heading towards Fashoda and what it hoped would be a historic meeting.

  When Gabriel Hanatoux, the French Foreign Minister, had secretly given his blessing to all this the eastern Sudan was still a territory in turmoil. The corrupt Egyptian administration had been driven out and, eleven years after Gordon’s death, the British seemed in no hurry to avenge him and fill the vacuum. Egypt had been a British protectorate since 1882 but Hanatoux saw a chance for bolder spirits to prosper. To further French influence in the Horn of Africa, he had already begun to undermine Italian attempts to conquer neighbouring Abyssinia by supplying Emperor Menelik with some of the arms he would use to win his surprising victory at Adowa.

  And not for the first time Whitehall suspected that France was plotting to restore its influence in Egypt where in November 1869 the Francophile Khedive Ismail had invited Napoléon Ill’s Empress Eugénie to Suez to open the canal built by her distant cousin Ferdinand de Lesseps. There was even talk that Marchand’s party were surveying sites for a massive dam that would control the waters of the Nile. But the French had arrived on the scene a little too late. A powerful Anglo-Egyptian army was now on the river and it had tasted blood.

  ‘We were confronted with the fact that a “friendly Power” had, unprovoked, endeavoured to rob us of the fruits of our victory,’ wrote Winston Churchill, who had charged with the 21st Lancers at Omdurman, a 25-year-old soldier journalist writing for the Morning Post at £15 a column and armed with the latest German automatic pistol. ‘While England had been devoting itself to great military operations … other operations – covert and deceitful – had been in progress designed solely for the mischievous and spiteful object of depriving them of the produce of their labours.’

  Fortunately Kitchener, who spoke reasonable French, having served in a volunteer ambulance unit during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, revealed an unsuspected talent for diplomacy and from the beginning he and Marchand maintained cordial relations. The flags of France, Britain and Egypt flew over Fashoda and for the senior officers there were reciprocal drinks invitations, though Marchand disliked Kitchener’s whisky and soda, which he had never sampled before, and thought it a poor exchange for even Nile-cooled champagne.

  Kitchener’s timely arrival with a battalion or so of infantry, two Maxim guns and some light artillery had undoubtedly saved the French. To the Dervishes all Europeans and their various mercenaries were bad news and they had already obliged these latest intruders to expend far more ammunition than they could afford with a determined assault on Fashoda. When he first sighted Kitchener’s paddle boats Marchand, thrice wounded in the service of his country, thought the Muslims had returned in force to finish them off.

  Now he found himself playing a gigantic game of bluff with his saviours. There was, of course, no question who would win a shoot-out: the commandant was hopelessly outnumbered. ‘An explorer in difficulties upon the Upper Nile,’ sniffed Lord Salisbury, and the Foreign Secretary saw that the Royal Navy reinforced its Gibraltar squadron so that the French found themselves outgunned in the Mediterranean as well. ‘Great Britain was determined to have Fashoda or fight,’ young Churchill, later an ardent Francophile, wrote in his bestselling book The River War, first published in 1899 less than a year after the confrontation.

  Perhaps the French would not have climbed down h
ad Hanatoux, Marchand’s patron, still been in charge of foreign affairs. But he had been replaced by the pragmatic Théophile Delcassé who, not thirty years since the loss of the border provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, saw Germany as the main enemy and Britain as a potential ally. After almost three months of brinkmanship Marchand, who had been obliged to absent himself to British-controlled Cairo to pick up his orders from the French consulate there, departed Fashoda for Abyssinia in the little boats that had come so far. The British troops bade them farewell with an honour guard and a band playing the ‘Marseillaise’. Before they left a sous-officier uprooted the flagstaff that had borne the tricolour and hurled it to the ground.

  In France there was outrage. The pestilential fort with its mosquitoes and crocodiles had monopolized public debate. A newspaper cartoon depicting Marianne as Little Red Riding Hood about to hand over her Fashoda parcel to the haggish wolf Britannia caught the national mood. Charles de Gaulle, the 8-year-old middle son of a monarchist schoolmaster, a veteran of the lost 1870 war against the Prussians, would remember for the rest of his long and eventful life his father’s heated discussions and his own brooding boyhood shame at this national humiliation.

  Among young French officers disgust with the government knew no bounds and there was talk, encouraged by the newspapers, that only war with England would remove this stain on their honour. Nor did they have the slightest doubt who would win. France would certainly not have waited thirteen years to reconquer Sudan. As allies in the Crimea, British tactics had been comical, none more so than that idiotic charge of a brigade of light cavalry they so gloried in and never mind maréchal Bosquet’s polite flattery, for ‘magnifique’ it was not. Even the barefoot Zulu had given them a drubbing, among the casualties France’s exiled Prince Imperial, the beau sabreur the Bonapartists would have made Napoléon IV, abandoned by his bolting English cavalry escort and left dismounted to fight it out alone on foot. Afterwards the Zulus said they suspected he was different because he fought like a lion with a broken assegai pulled from his own body. Every Frenchman knew the English, though not bad sailors, were very bad soldiers. But here lay the rub. Britannia really did rule the waves. The ascendancy of the Royal Navy was such, their native moat so uncrossable, attacks on their colonies so vulnerable to overwhelming maritime interception, it was impossible to get at the drunken and overfed rosbifs and give them the thrashing they so richly deserved.