A large crowd of Parisians had begun to gather outside the Hotel de Ville. They seemed more curious than angry, though P. J. Phillips of the New York Times cabled his foreign editor: “Rather than submit to this last crushing piece of Teutonism France will fight.” That was precisely what the premier and three of his civilian ministers wanted to do, but they had no Bonaparte, nor even a Foch, to lead the troops of their Third Republic. After setting forth the basic facts, Sarraut turned to Gamelin and asked him what the army proposed to do. According to the premier’s testimony before a postwar investigating committee established by the French National Assembly at the insistence of wartime Resistance leaders, the premier expected France’s commander in chief to unroll a map revealing swift, imaginative maneuvers which would drive the intruders back across the Rhine. Instead, Gamelin mildly asked permission to take “les premières mesures de précaution.” Asked what those were, he replied that he wanted to recall soldiers on furlough, move reinforcements toward the frontier, and begin preparations to send up more troops should that seem advisable.46
Sarraut was aghast. Gamelin was planning the classic dispositions of a Saint-Cyrl’École graduate whose native soil is threatened by an invasion. “Naturally,” the généralissime said, “there is no question of forcing the Rhine, on which the Germans are virtually entrenched already.” He then ran through what Sarraut later called “the whole gamut of perils.” If France advanced into the Rhineland, the German riposte would be an “attack on us through Belgium, aerial bombing in Paris… attacks by submarines, artillery bombardment of our Rhine cities, Strasbourg, Mulhouse….” He went on and on. Joseph Paul-Boncour, minister for League of Nations affairs, interrupted to tell the general that he would like to see him in Mainz—a German industrial city ninety miles from the French border—“as soon as possible.” That, Gamelin replied, was “une autre affaire.” He would like nothing better, he added, “but first you must give me the means.”
At first they didn’t understand. As commander in chief he was entrusted with all the military means the country possessed. Maurin entered the discussion; presently the two generals were in animated conversation, and slowly the premier and his civilian ministers comprehended. The soldiers were discussing a mobilisation générale, costing thirty million francs and consisting first of putting a million men in positions which, with the Maginot Line, would permit the army to shield France. But that, the exasperated Sarraut pointed out, wasn’t the problem. There were no signs that the Nazis had designs on French soil, at least not now. They had invaded a buffer zone where no soldier of either nation had the right to bear arms—a neutral land essential to France’s survival and her diplomatic commitments in eastern Europe. The generals looked at one another, shrugged, and spread their hands in a gesture which could only be interpreted as “Hélas, la politique!”47
The baffled premier explained that he simply wanted an opération de police, with Gamelin using his vast superiority in infantry strength, fire-power, and air power—the few Nazi aircraft, unarmed, were based on airstrips too far away to intervene in a swift expulsion. It was an absurdité. The invaders had three battalions; the poilus would overwhelm them. “After all,” Sarraut told his commander in chief, “you have just a symbolic force in front of you.”
Shirer was reporting that “for the first time since 1870 gray-clad German soldiers and blue-clad French troops face each other across the upper Rhine.” The world awaited the response in Paris to this gross violation of Versailles and Locarno. Had it known the truth, it would have been incredulous. The elected leaders of France were begging their high command to put up their fists. And the generals were refusing. Gamelin and Maurin were immovable. The généralissime, backed by his war minister, insisted that his army was “une force purement défensive.” Asked to propose an alternative, he suggested that the government lodge a vigorous protest with the League of Nations.
Sarraut asked Gamelin point-blank: “If we act alone against Germany, without allies, what will be the prospect?” The general said that at first, “given the present conditions,” the French would have “la prépondérance,” but in a long war Germany’s industrial power and numerical superiority might tip the balance.48
There was a long silence as they pondered the implications of this: another four years—perhaps more than four—of trenches, barbed wire, incessant shellfire, attaques en masse which gained a hundred yards at most, “leaving the dead,” as Scott Fitzgerald had written, “like a million bloody rugs,” and the legless or blind stumbling around the country while desperate young widows became streetwalkers. All this, and the possibility that France would be defeated in the end.
Then someone pointed out that the premier had assumed they would be acting without allies. France was allied with Britain in the west, and, in the east, with Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia. Locarno had specifically committed Italy, Belgium, and Britain to support the French in expelling troops or weapons Germany sent into the zone. And the Locarno powers weren’t the only countries affected by Nazi aggression in the Rhineland. Aides were summoned, instructed to place telephone calls; they slipped back with promises of support from the Poles, the Czechs, and the Rumanians. Even Austria, bound to France by no pact, was ready to back her. The Belgians and the Italians had adopted attitudes of cautious reserve.49
France’s most powerful ally, of course, lay across the Channel. “Above all,” as Churchill later observed, the French “had a right to look to Great Britain, having regard to the guarantee… against German aggression, and the pressure we had put upon France for the earlier evacuation of the Rhineland.” His Britannic Majesty’s ambassador to France, Sir George Clark, didn’t wait for a telephone call from a Sarraut aide. On instructions from Anthony Eden, he hastened to the Quai d’Orsay and insisted “très vigoureusement,” according to Flandin, that France take “no military measures which commit the future before prior consultation with the British Government.” Sarraut and Flandin, trying to consult Whitehall by telephone, discovered what Hitler already knew—that on weekends most leaders of the English government were inaccessible. Eden was available but unhelpful. When Charles Corbin, France’s ambassador to London, called on him he was told that no decision could be reached before Monday. Corbin reported to the Quai that Eden had “abstained, despite my insistence, from giving me any indication of his own views.” Corbin had mentioned Britain’s treaty commitment; Eden, he said, had “maintained silence.”50
Sarraut was affronted, but France, lacking a moat to separate her from the Germans, needed Britain more than the British needed her, and after an interval the premier put his pride in his pocket and authorized Flandin to inform the British that rather than take an “isolated position,” the French government preferred “to confer with the other powers party to Locarno.”51
Eden handled the French with a duplicity they did not deserve. Among the information Eden withheld from Flandin was that after lunch on Saturday he had driven to Chequers, the country home of prime ministers. In Eden’s words, “Baldwin said little, as was his wont on foreign affairs. Though personally friendly to France, he was clear in his mind that there would be no support in Britain for any military action by the French. I could only agree.”52
Back in the Foreign Office that afternoon, the foreign secretary drafted a long memorandum for submission to the cabinet Monday morning, and then a statement he would deliver in the House of Commons afterward. Any ultimatum to the Germans, he wrote, or even a strong note demanding that the Wehrmacht evacuate its troops in the buffer zone “should certainly not be made unless the powers concerned are prepared to enforce it by military action.” Hitler’s seizure of the zone, he felt, “has deprived us of a useful bargaining counter”—he was still trapped in that non sequitur—but above all, “We must resist any attempt to apply financial and economic sanctions” against Germany. At this point—and the situation in the zone would remain unchanged throughout the crisis—fewer than five thousand German soldiers had been posted
within twenty miles of the French frontier. They were not deployed for battle, and they lacked tank support.53
Eden told Corbin on Sunday that there would be no British reinforcements. Reluctantly he agreed to fly over on Tuesday for talks with other Locarno diplomats, provided “it be understood” that those attending the conference would not be asked to agree “on concrete propositions.” The French minister concluded that France’s only hope of salvation lay in changing Eden’s mind, or in persuading Englishmen who made or influenced the government’s decisions to change it for him.54
That would be difficult. The Daily Herald (Labour) had already insisted that Hitler be taken at his word. Lord Lothian approved of the German invasion, remarking that, “after all, they are only going into their own back garden,” a statement that has been widely, and mistakenly, attributed to The Times. It would not, however, have been out of place there; Dawson’s editorial was headed “A Chance to Rebuild,” and although it opened by describing the Nazi coup as “Herr Hitler’s invasion,” Dawson scorned the “sensationally minded,” who had called it “an act of ‘aggression.’ ” As he saw it, the Germans were understandably afflicted by a “deep, instinctive fear—the dread of encirclement,” and the Rhineland had become, in their eyes, “more than a badge of inferior status, a source of military weakness to a Power which might one day become involved in a war on both sides again.”55
Nancy Astor, Tom Jones, and Attorney General Sir Thomas Inskip were guests that weekend at one of Lord Lothian’s house parties at Blickling Hall. The host and his party prepared a comment on Hitler’s seizure of the Rhineland and telegraphed it to Baldwin. They “wholeheartedly” endorsed the Führer’s act, urged that the Nazi “entrance to the zone” be ignored in the light of peace proposals before the Reichstag, and suggested that seizure of the buffer zone should be regarded as an “assertion… of equality and not an act of aggression.” Tom Jones wrote in his diary that he intended to persuade Baldwin to accept Hitler’s proposal at its face value even before discussing it with the cabinet. Harold Nicolson, a wise diarist, noted that the general mood “is one of fear. Anything to keep out of war…. On all sides one hears sympathy for Germany. It is all very tragic and sad.”56
Ambassador Corbin, listening to Eden’s speech in the diplomatic gallery of the House Monday afternoon, found it discouraging. Thankfully, the foreign secretary said, there was “no reason to suppose that the present German action implies a threat of hostilities.” He scolded the Germans’ disrespect for treaties. The invasion had “profoundly shaken confidence in any engagement into which the Government of Germany may enter”—it is a pity that Neville Chamberlain, sitting beside Eden, did not write that down and commit it to memory—but His Majesty’s Government would study the Führer’s new “peace proposals seriously and objectively” to see whether they would shore up “the structure of peace.”57
Eden flew to Paris accompanied by Lord Halifax and Ralph Wigram, but the conference was sterile. The French foreign minister wanted immediate action—ejecting the Germans from the Rhineland while imposing economic, financial, and military sanctions against the aggressor. Eden noted: “The gravity of Flandin’s statements exceeds anything which has been said before.” He opposed meeting force with force, and to Flandin’s surprise and dismay the Belgian premier agreed. The Italian ambassador, after bitterly reminding them that his country was still under league sanctions, folded his arms, lifted his chin, and spoke not another word.58
As they broke up, Eden said he was “glad that there was no intention of trying to reach decisions at this meeting.” Flandin, who had convened the conference with precisely that intention, looked directly into Eden’s eyes and said prophetically: “Negotiations will end in nothing, or rather, they will sanction a new retreat. And this time the retreat will be decisive, for it will generate a whole series of retreats.”59
The following morning the British cabinet met to hear the foreign secretary’s report. In the Quai, Eden had been bland and elusive, but in Downing Street he could be frank. He said he was convinced that if the Germans were permitted to keep the Rhineland, and to fortify it, war would be inevitable in two years—a war which “would be fought under very unfavourable conditions.” The difficulty, he said, was that Sarraut and Flandin did not reflect the views of the typical Frenchman. France was “pacifist to the core”; in battle she would be an unreliable ally. Alfred Duff Cooper, the new secretary for war, disagreed. He too believed that war was inevitable, but he thought that the time to stand up to Hitler was now. French morale would rise, he thought, once the French army had received its marching orders. According to cabinet minutes, he pointed out that “in three years’ time”—1939—“Germany would have 100 divisions and a powerful fleet.” Even with Parliament’s adoption of the most recent White Paper, England could not match Nazi rearmament stride for stride, and “We should not, relatively, therefore, be in a better position.”60
But the rest of the cabinet, including the prime minister, felt otherwise. Baldwin even opposed an appeal to the League of Nations. At some point, he said, “it would be necessary to point out to the French” that intervention in the Rhineland would not only let loose “another great war…. It would probably… result in Germany going Bolshevik.” The first lord of the Admiralty and the secretary for air acknowledged that their position was “a disadvantageous one.” One of Baldwin’s ministers observed that “public opinion” strongly opposed Allied intervention in the neutral zone. Another concurred. And this was a government whose respect for public opinion was profound. In the end they decided to do nothing. Indeed, Baldwin observed, peace was “worth taking almost any risk.”61
Quiet and efficient, British civil servants were taken for granted by most cabinet ministers, and when political issues arose they were treated brusquely or even ignored, despite the fact that most of them belonged to the same class and had gone to the same schools. Sir Robert Vansittart, forceful, knighted, and destined for a peerage, was an exception. Ralph Wigram was farther down the ladder. In Paris he had sat behind Eden and Halifax, speaking only when asked for a date, a statistic, a protocol, or technical advice. Nevertheless, Wigram had vehemently agreed with Flandin, believing a policy of drift now would be fatal, and afterward he had a private word with him. If the Locarno powers were to reconvene in London Thursday, he asked, why not move the league council’s meeting there, rather than Geneva? The hope of action was small, but whatever the Locarno decision, it would gain prestige if promptly endorsed by the League of Nations. Flandin warmly agreed, and spoke to the others. It was done. But Wigram was still troubled, and once he returned to British soil he drove straight to Chartwell.
Although he was exiled from public life in England, Churchill’s political statements continued to be closely studied in foreign chancelleries by those who sensed that eventually his hour would strike. Adolf Hitler continued to be among them. The Führer loathed Churchill and always spoke of him with undisguised malice, but he could not ignore him. In the beginning his insults were merely ugly. Winston, he said, was “a nervous old hen.” You couldn’t “talk sense” to such a man, the Führer said; he was merely “ein romantischer Phantast”—a romantic dreamer. However, once Churchill opened up with his heavy rhetorical artillery, Hitler’s invective also escalated. “The gift Mr. Churchill possesses is the gift to lie with a pious expression on his face and to distort the truth…. His abnormal state of mind can only be explained as symptomatic of either a paralytic disease or a drunkard’s ravings!” After his offer of nonaggression treaties, meant to blur the jagged edge of his thrust into the Rhineland, Hitler predicted that “only the Churchill clique” would “stand in the way of peace.”62
Actually, the Rhineland crisis had broken at an awkward time for Winston. When the Foreign Office phoned Chartwell and read him a translation of Hitler’s March 7 speech, he instantly saw it for what it was: “comfort for everyone on both sides of the Atlantic who wished to be humbugged.” But because he still expect
ed a summons to No. 10 and a cabinet appointment, he suppressed his most compelling instincts and spared Baldwin’s government.63
In public, and especially in House debates, Churchill was civil, almost subdued. Parliament was amused; Winston, for once, was maneuvering for office. He had been sounding his trumpet of alarm for over three years now. His notes had been clear and true, yet they had neither altered the government’s foreign policy nor slowed the rush toward catastrophe. Since he couldn’t give up, he had redoubled his efforts to wedge his way into a seat at the cabinet table, where, he thought, he could control the clattering train. Winston believed, and virtually every parliamentary correspondent and MP not in office shared his conviction, that he would soon be appointed to the office, still vacant, of minister of defense.
Yet though he had spared the prime minister, Winston had not remained mute after Nazi troops burst into the Rhineland. He and Austen Chamberlain had formed a team, working in tandem to arouse the House by spelling out the consequences if the Nazi coup were to pass unchallenged. Austria would be the Führer’s next objective, Churchill predicted, and Austen pointed out that “if Austria perishes Czechoslovakia becomes indefensible.” Once Hitler had mastered eastern Europe, they both told the House, he would turn westward, stalking France and Britain. Some MPs, Churchill observed, thought the French were exaggerating the danger. He told them: “If we had been invaded four times in a hundred years, we should understand better how terrible that injury is.” In France and Belgium, he said, “the avalanche of fire and steel which fell upon them twenty years ago” was still “an overpowering memory and obsession.” He asked: “How should we feel if—to change the metaphor—we saw a tiger, the marks of whose teeth and claws had scarred every limb of our bodies, coming toward us and crouching within exactly the distance of a single spring?”64