of you to express such lack of faith in the French Government, Mademoiselle Tiplady.'
'We have surely passed the time for politeness,' returned Elizabeth evenly. 'All they have presided over so far is three weeks of headlong retreat.'
'Well, they shall be stopped, as last time. _Ils ne passeront pas.'_
He slapped the table as he used the words of Marshal Pйtain, who had become vice-Premier in May, and who with the Commander-in-Chief General Weygand had a combined age of one hundred and fifty seven. Madame Piйry busily rang a shrill little handbell for the _ate de veau. _Our conversation degenerated into perfunctory scraps. We were laying our cutlery on the _porte-couteaux_ for the meat plates to be changed for the vegetables in the French fashion, when our meal suffered an unimagined interruption. The maid burst in, wide-eyed and open mouthed. _'Madame, c'est monsieur…'_
Jean-Baptiste appeared in the dining-room on her heels. I immediately recognized him, though he was not in the bright colours of his photograph. His uniform was dishevelled and caked with mud, a tear in the sleeve. He had his revolver, and carried a steel helmet instead of his
As we recovered from the surprise, I tugged Elizabeth's sleeve, but the parents insisted on introducing us, saying we should stay, we would have a party. The son sprawled at the table while madame fussed with the maids to prepare him a meal. Meanwhile, he cut segments of a large _brie _cheese lying in its mattress of straw, gobbling them in his fingers and gulping down a bottle of burgundy. Professor Piйry asked, _'Mais ton rйgiment? II est actuellement а Paris?'_
In reply, the lieutenant snapped his fingers. _'Mon regiment, c'est fini. Kaput.'_
The professor looked amazed, alarmed and then horrified. Jean-Baptiste stared at Elizabeth and myself, and said bleakly in English, 'You imagine I've run away, I suppose? I could hardly have done so, even if I'd had the inclination. I had no regiment to run away from. To put it more explicitly, my regiment had run away from me. _Bien sыr,_ the whole division had run away. We left our artillery, stores, ammunition, petrol, everything. The men threw their rifles in the ditches and set off for home.' He cut himself a length of bread, digging up a blob of cheese with the crust.
'Our English friends look shocked,' he continued sarcastically. 'Had you been at the front yourselves, you might have felt more charitable. Our soldiers didn't fight, because they didn't see the point of it. The Germans were going to walk over us, obviously. Whether they walked over us alive or over us dead was a matter of indifference to them. It was also a matter of indifference to the outcome of the war. It was not, however, a matter of indifference to us. _C'est logique, hein?'_
He had brought the horror of the battle into the room. 'It was rifles against tanks, an equation which does not offer much difficulty in the solving. Their planes were at us all the time. Messerschmitts strafing us, Junkers, Stuka dive-bombers. We never saw a plane of our own.' He turned a harder look at me. Nor of the RAF, monsieur.'
I returned, 'The RAF was operating in a different area, doubtless.'
'The RAF was not operating at all Your planes were all sitting at home. Churchill would not send so much as a squadron to save us. Do you know why I am sitting here now, instead of fighting honourably with my comrades?' he asked angrily. 'Because you English have run away faster than us. We were expecting you to attack the enemy with us in Flanders. But Lord Gort marched his troops in the opposite direction. And when they got to the sea, the French had to hold off the enemy while the British embarked for home.'
'I just don't believe that,' objected Elizabeth sharply.
'You may not like to, mademoiselle, but that is the truth. The British soldiers were taken aboard the ships, the
'The poor boy is distressed,' said the professor.
'That
Jean-Baptiste shrugged. He said quietly, 'We shall see, after the war. If any of us are left alive.'
During this episode I was aware of the telephone shrilling in the hall. As everyone in the house was too distracted to notice, Elizabeth slipped out to answer it. She came back saying it was a Madame Chalmer, wishing to speak to me urgently. That was the name I had found from the concierge in the rue des Brouettes of Lamartine's mistress.
26
The story of Madame Brigitte Chalmar's life was singularly uninteresting, particularly when recounted in German and the French which Elizabeth translated for me while driving. Early on the next morning of Tuesday, June 4, we had picked her up near the Bois de Boulogne at Porte Dauphine Mйtro station, at the end of her line from Clichy. Madame Chalmar wore a smart flower-patterned cotton dress, silk stockings, a wide-brimmed hat and white gloves, embellished by an umbrella, a hat box and a bulging suitcase secured with a length of rope. Lamartine was at Tours, and she promised that she would face me with him in return for being taken safely from Paris.
'I was in Hamburg and Berlin, after I had finished at the Sorbonne,' she explained in German, sitting in the back of the small car. 'I was perfectly disgusted with the Nazis, so I wrote about them for such intelligent periodicals as _La Libertй._ In the end the Gestapo expelled me. That was before I married Monsieur Chalmar, but of course the Nazis would soon find me if ever they installed themselves in sight of the Arc de Triomphe. If you are running a police state you develop a skill in keeping files on absolutely everybody. My husband was a nincompoop,' she continued with the calm severity a Frenchwoman can apply to men. 'Then I met Dr Lamartine, who was of quite different character, an intellectual, a man I could talk to. Of course, his views on the Nazis are not mine, but perhaps he is more sophisticated. He sees how you must keep strict order in a country these days to have any order at all. Look at all the strikes and riots we've had in France! Henri always thought a dose of Hitler would have done the French a lot of good, and perhaps he was right. _Vous permettez, mademoiselle?'_
She took a packet of Weekend from her large and shabby brown handbag. 'Henri was saying things like that at the time of the Popular Front and Leon Blum, when everyone in France with a little money put by was far more frightened of the Communists than of Hitler, I assure you. In those elections of 1936, Lйon Blum was beaten up and spent the campaign in hospital, but he won. Though everyone continued to go on strike, nevertheless. Of course, now I only write articles for the women's magazines, I've changed, it's only natural, a girl calms down and becomes a serene woman, otherwise she would tire a man out in a fortnight. _N'est ce pas?_ And that swine Lamartine has left me in the lurch,' she added with abrupt sourness, 'he doesn't care if I end up on Luneberg Heath in a concentration camp.' She removed her broad-brimmed hat and fanned herself with it. '_Ah, c'est effroyable, cette vague de chaleur. _But it's preferable to the trains, which are unbelievably crowded.'
They were even more crowded the following week, when crammed expresses whisked thousands of Parisians from under the nose of von Kьchler's 18th Army with an efficiency commendable to the Societй des Chemins de Fer Nationale. After the French government had fled down the same Route Nationale Ten we were then negotiating, our successors on the road were less fortunate. It became choked to immobility with men, women and children, the sick, the old, the pregnant, Frenchmen, foreigners who had once already escaped Hitler's clutch, all pouring from Paris by car, lorry, bicycle, on foot, with barrows, carts or perambulators, without provision, without destination. We could still buy petrol, though Elizabeth had prudently stowed cans in the boot. When a week later vehicles ran dry of fuel, or crawled and boiled to a halt, they were pushed by their desperately impatient followers into the ditch. Girls prostituted themselves in barns for food, and the peasants sold water at a franc a bottle. Everyone then was ill- tempered, frightened and crying, the Luftwaffe bombed the crossroads and strafed the unending pathetic columns as they wished, every now and then police motor-cyclists ploughed the way for a column of black limousines with horns blaring, as officials raced for safety faster than the people they had left without it.
Our traffic was already heavy, and seemed to increase as we went along, all the cars with luggage and bundles piled on the roofs, several bearing Belgian number plates. At Chartres, the traffic was jammed right through the town, everyone pounding their horn buttons in anguished impotence. A gendarme slowly worked his way along, examining all travellers' papers.
_'J'ai mal а la tкte,'_ Madame Chalmar informed him bad temperedly through the window. _'Je suis а
