Meantime the news was pouring in, and growing more and more frightful. The Germans were swarming all over Holland, and it was evident that the carefully prepared defenses of that little country were not counting for much. The main attack was centered at the southernmost tip, where Belgium and Holland and Germany meet; the defenses of two small countries had not been co-ordinated, since that might have been a violation of “neutrality.” Now the Nazis didn’t have to be neutral, so they rushed their tanks through Maastricht, and their spies and saboteurs and Dutch traitors held the bridges, or held the banks while the engineers built new bridges over the innumerable canals and streams of the Lowlands.
Everything was taken in a rush, because lives meant nothing to Adolf Hitler—not even German lives. Before he came to join his troops he made one of his grandiose speeches declaring: “The fight beginning today decides the fate of the German nation for the next thousand years.” He had been getting the nation ready for more than seven years, and had been getting his own youth ready for almost a score. Now he had aroused in them the necessary spirit of “fanaticism”—his favorite word, which he rarely left out of a speech. It took them only five days to sweep over Holland and force its army to surrender and its Queen and government to flee. Just to teach the Dutch the proper fear of Nazi “fanaticism,” the bombers came in broad daylight over defenseless Rotterdam and destroyed twenty-six thousand buildings, killing twenty thousand people.
Meantime the armies were on the way through Belgium. The Albert Canal was supposed to be the country’s principal defense; it had concrete walls thirty feet high, and was supposed to make a perfect tank trap; but the Belgians had postponed blowing up the bridges, and the spies and paratroopers got there first. In the few cases where a bridge was blown, the Nazi engineers at once appeared with a sectional bridge to fit that spot. Fort Eben-Emael, supposed to be impregnable, was taken in a few hours by a combination of dive-bombers, smokescreens, flamethrowers, and grenadiers. Leopold, King of the Belgians, who had refused Allied help in advance, now called for it loudly, and became angry when it did not arrive in sufficient force. He had lived surrounded by “Rexists,” the Fascists of his country, and now he first got the Allied armies into his country, and then surrendered his own armies and left his allies cut off.
IX
Lanny carried out his promise and went to call on Madame de Portes. He found her in a state bordering on hysterics, for she took this Blitzkrieg as a personal affront, a betrayal of her hopes, an exposure of herself as an incompetent political guide. She wanted Lanny to tell her what to do, and of course he had to tell her what he knew she wanted to be told—that some way must be found to stop this cruel slaughter, so ruinous to both France and Germany, and beneficial only to Bolshevists.
There wasn’t much for a P.A. to do at the moment; events were happening so fast that nobody could keep up with them, to say nothing of keeping ahead. F.D.R. would get his news in the same way as everybody else, from radio and newspaper correspondents who were posted all over Europe and who told everything the censors would permit. It is in the nature of both armies and governments to try to suppress bad news; but all that anyone needed these days was a map of the countries involved and the names of the places where there was fighting. That frightful new weapon, the German Panzer division, could not be stopped by anything the Allies had. The tanks rolled, and the motorized artillery, and the armored trucks full of men with machine guns and mortars; overhead came the dive-bombers, screaming down from the clouds, blowing up enemy tanks and machine-gunning enemy troops. Nothing could stand up against this combination, and apparently they had no fear of being outflanked—they just raced on and on, and the infantry behind them had nothing to do but hold the places which parachute and air-transport troops had seized.
The Germans had five thousand tanks; and, by an odd quirk of fate, the best of them, with the deadliest fire-power, had come from Czechoslovakia—that magnificent Skoda plant which Baron Schneider had owned and which the Nazis had so rudely wrested from him. What a blow to the men of Munich, what a mockery of their dreams! They might have had those tanks on their own side; they might have had the excellent Czech army, and the Polish army, and, with a little wisdom and good faith, the Russian army; but instead, the tanks came crashing through the Ardennes forest and broke the line which the French had extended there. Only five days after the start of the offensive they crossed the river Meuse and took Sedan; Lanny remembered the steep wooded sides of that valley, thickly studded with pillboxes, and he wondered, where was the French army and what was it doing? In the drawing-rooms of Paris, ladies and gentlemen looked at each other, dazed by this news, and saying: “Our real forces have not gone into action yet.” They tried to comfort themselves: “Gamelin is holding back; he is waiting to strike them on the flank; he is leading them into a trap from which they will not escape.”
But the insiders, those who were close to the government, were not fooling themselves; they knew by the end of the first week that the Nazis had created a weapon that neither the French nor the British could stand up against. The breakthrough on the Meuse was widened to more than a hundred miles, and there were tank battles on the plains beyond the river. The only question was, which way would the Germans head—straight west toward Paris, or north to outflank the British army, or south to take the Maginot Line from the rear, a possibility which had not been considered when that one-hundred-thousand-million-franc monstrosity was constructed. The Germans did not delay to let them know; in one day they drove to the river Somme, and turned north up that valley, all the way to the Channel, penetrating like a scythe and ready like a scythe to cut down everything within the sweep of its blade.
X
Strolling past the Café de la Rotonde, Lanny was hailed by a familiar voice and saw a familiar shock of red hair, belonging to one of the newspaper fellows whom he had known in the good old days of the League Assemblies in Geneva. Ordinarily he dodged publicity perils, but now he wanted to listen to somebody, anybody. Here, it turned out, was a man who had been up at the Sedan front, and now was having a drink to restore himself after a futile bout with the French censors. This was a story for which the whole world sat waiting, a story of the French army in a sort of general abdication of its functions, the soldiers stopping to fight here and there at the word of some officer whom they knew and trusted, but mostly marching cross-country away from the battlefields and in the general direction of home; now and then tumbling into a ditch when strafing planes came roaring down upon them, but otherwise having slight interest in the war.
“Nothing like it has ever happened in the world,” said “Knick,” and spread out an afternoon paper, in which the public of Paris was told under startling headlines that the heroic grande armée de la république was now ready and that the great counterattack was to be expected at any moment, the hammer blow that was going to shatter the German scythe, and cut off those Panzer divisions which thought they had cut off the British and French. “Listen to this sapient expert,” said the correspondent, and read how the Germans had overextended themselves as no army had ever dared to do in history; the distance from their base to the Channel was some three hundred kilometers, and every meter of it was exposed to attacks from both sides, by powerful and perfectly equipped French and British forces. “They have committed suicide,” declared this expert.
“What he says would be perfectly correct,” declared Knick, “if only the French wanted to fight; but they don’t.”
“How do you explain it?” inquired the P.A.
“There’s only one explanation possible—that is, treason at the top. The heads of the French army are Nazis at heart, and don’t want to fight their best friends.”
“That sounds like motion-picture stuff, Knick,” said Lanny.
“Call it what you please,” replied the other. “It’s what a lot of us Americans have decided is the truth. How can you have lived all these years in France and not realized how the German and Italian and Spanish agents have
been working here, and the billions of francs they have been pouring out? Now they are cashing in.”
“Well, you know,” explained Lanny, “I’m an art expert, and I’ve been hunting old masters and not paying much attention to political talk. But I agree with you that the facts ought to be told somehow.”
“We’re going to find a way to outwit the damned censors, and it won’t be long, believe you me!” exclaimed the red-headed and hotheaded correspondent.
XI
Lanny went out to spend a week-end at the Château de Bruyne. In an upstairs room lay le capitaine, Denis fils, with a bullet hole through his right shoulder blade and another through his left arm. He had got these near Maubeuge, where his regiment had been rushed forward to the aid of Belgium. The Blitzkrieg had rolled over it, and Denis had crawled into some thick brush and lain there till dark. Then he had found a couple of his men and with their help had got out by a side path and been taken to the rear in a French car. When his wounds had been dressed and he had had a night’s sleep, he had made his own way home. Obviously, they wouldn’t want anybody in a hospital who was able to walk, and to stay near the front would not help to win the war but merely invite capture by the onrushing hordes.
His devoted wife was taking care of him, and his father let him alone, for they had had a violent disagreement concerning the war and its causes. Eight and a half months at the front had sufficed to make the son into a patriot, convinced that his country had been tricked into inaction, and that the Nazis meant to conquer it completely, take away its industries, and set it to growing wheat and wine and fruit for German tables. He was lying helpless, unable to lift a newspaper or turn a radio dial, but chafing like a caged animal, eager to get back into the fight. He could hardly bring himself to believe the news he heard, and the tears ran down his cheeks as Lanny assured him that the worst was true, the Germans had taken Abbeville at the mouth of the Somme, and cut off the British army and a large section of the French, including Denis’s own division. Now the British were making a desperate stand in Calais, but how they could escape was impossible to imagine.
Lanny sat with his hand resting on the younger man’s knee and let his tears flow. This was Marie’s son, and Lanny had known him since he was a lad in short trousers, and had shared his confidences, and of late years managed to avoid argument, no matter how far apart they drifted. Now he listened to Denis’s story, and answered his questions. Yes, it was terrible, incredible; Lanny had been staggered, like everybody else. The German armor had been stronger and their airplanes far more numerous. Denis cried out that it wasn’t only that, it was the French spirit that had failed; not the common soldier, who was still the brave garçon he had always been, but the men at the top, les sales politiciens, quarreling among themselves——
“France is a free country,” put in the older man. “There must be disagreement in a republic.”
“Yes, but we have abused our freedom. In the face of such a foe, it was our necessity to come to an understanding, and to protect our heritage. We could have had just as good tanks, just as good planes as the Germans.”
“You know I did what little I could on that score, Denis.”
“Where were our planes while we were fighting? I pledge you my word I never saw one, not one the whole time. But the Germans were over us all day, like a swarm of bees, diving down with screaming noises, that were supposed to frighten us worse than the bullets—and they did, with some. Mon dieu, c’était affreux!”
XII
Such was the conversation upstairs; and downstairs Lanny entered the drawing-room and found his elderly host in conference with a visitor whose face was known to everyone in France, and indeed wherever people read newspapers. It was a wide face with prominent cheekbones, heavy-lidded dark eyes, and large lips partly concealed by a thick black mustache. The man’s complexion was olive green, and his heavy hair drooped and needed cutting; when he became excited the muscles swelled in his bull’s neck, he shook his head violently, and a lock of hair fell over into his eyes. He was rarely without a cigarette, and kept it between his lips so long that you worried about the possibility of his mustache catching fire.
He had one of those unusual names which spell backward the same as forward, and he had taken that as a lucky omen, the promise of a great career. He had been born in a small village in Auvergne, where his father had been butcher, tavernkeeper, and postmaster. Little Pierre had had to drive twelve miles every day to get the mail, and on the way he had read newspapers and learned about the world. He had become a lawyer, and espoused the cause of the poor and lowly; he was one of those Frenchmen who learn politics in the Socialist movement, and then climb out of it to fame and fortune. The Auvergnats play in French humor the same part as the Scots in England; they are supposed to love and cherish money, and Pierre had set out to make immense amounts of it, and now was said to be worth a hundred million francs. It was the French version of the theme, “Home-town boy makes good,” for he had come back to his village of Chateldon and bought the medieval castle on the hill, also the medicinal springs, and was making a fortune out of exploiting the water.
He rose politely when Lanny came in; and Denis said: “This is my old friend, Lanny Budd. Monsieur Laval.”
“I have had the pleasure of meeting Monsieur Budd,” replied the ex-Premier.
“More than once,” said Lanny. “The last time I saw you was on the beach at Cannes.” He knew that under that proper black vest was a mat of hair like a bear’s.
“Lanny is one of us,” added the elderly host. “You may, speak freely in his presence.” He addressed the visitor as “mon cher Maître,” which meant that he thought of him as a lawyer, in which capacity he had served Denis for many years. Laval in return used the phase “mon vieux,” which is about equivalent to “old fellow,” and meant that when a man has been three times Premier of France and is now a Senateur, he is on familiar terms with even the richest and haughtiest.
They resumed their seats, and Laval gave a tug at his stiff collar, as if his tie was too tight. He invariably wore a white string tie of wash material, a practice which his foes called a measure of economy, but which Lanny guessed was a political device, on the theory that in a democratic land a statesman should have some harmless eccentricity to amuse his constituents.
Said Denis: “Monsieur Laval has come to discuss with me the measures which will have to be taken to save la patrie.”
Lanny understood that this was intended to get the conversation started in its former confidential vein. He assisted by remarking: “I hope it is something which can be done without delay, so that we may spare Paris the calamity which we have witnessed in Rotterdam.”
“Vous avez raison, Monsieur Budd!” exclaimed Laval, and realized that this was a man of sense. “I have, as you may know, felt it necessary to retire from public life for a time, and let a band of Leftist adventurers have their way with France. I had done all I could to check them.”
“I understand that you breed beautiful race horses on your estate in Normandy,” remarked Lanny, with his most winning smile.
“Vraiment, Monsieur Budd! You should come and visit me some day and see them.”
“First we have to make peace, Monsieur Laval. I hope that you are using your immense political influence to that end.”
XIII
After that there was no reason for a statesman to hesitate. He explained that it had been the dream of his life to bring about a Mediterranean Federation, to include France, Italy and Spain; in such a group France, with her greater wealth, population and culture, would inevitably have become the leader. But this aim had been thwarted, and now it was necessary to recognize the fact that Germany had won the leadership, and was going to establish the new European order. To resist further would be suicide; it was obvious that the greater the expense to which Germany was put, the greater the reparations which France would be expected to pay.
“It should be obvious to any thinking man that once we have made friends with
Germany, she no longer has any interest in hurting us; Russia is her true foe, and ours, and only camouflaged sedition could keep us from recognizing that. Now we shall have to submit to humiliation for a time, but once we convince the Germans of our good faith we can become full partners in the New Order. All that Hitler is trying to do is to put the right men in control of France.”
Who these right men were could be a matter of no uncertainty to Pierre Laval. Unquestionably the man to become President of the new government was Marshal Pétain, who had abandoned his Spanish mission and was awaiting the new call to serve his country. As for Premier, Laval would not have been himself if he had been shy about submitting his claims. He was the intimate friend of Otto Abetz, and trusted by all the Germans; they knew that he had been the determined advocate of peace between the two nations, ever since the days before Hitler, when he, as Premier, had taken Briand, his Foreign Minister, to visit Hindenburg in Berlin. Now he named a proposed Cabinet, composed of the old-time pacifists, renegade Socialists like himself, and German agents. Bonnet, he declared, had raised a fund to promote this cause, though he did not meet Laval publicly, for reasons of politics.
Lanny listened, and found it according to the reports which he had already sent in. He ventured to suggest one or two names, and Laval revealed that he was in touch with these persons. Owner of a great chain of newspapers, this fripon mongole, as his enemies called him, knew everybody in France who could be bought or influenced to work against the cause of democratic Socialism which had given him his education and his career. Lanny observed with repugnance difficult to conceal the rancid hatred which Laval manifested for those men in public life who had remained true to their youthful ideals. He who was suspected of having Mongolian blood—and with good reason, since the hordes of Attila had penetrated into central France—did not hesitate to spit upon Mandel and Blum because they were Jews, and to accuse Daladier of corruption—this man who had made his millions by protecting every kind of stockmarket racketeer, and by showing the great rich masters of the Comité des Forges how to conceal their profits and their frauds.