The Sinking of the Lancastria Read Online Free PDF

complaining that he had had no lunch and was very hungry. On the way into the city, they passed crowds of refugees before reaching the préfecture where they found the tough-minded Interior Minister, Georges Mandel, talking on two telephones at onceas he tried to rally local officials to resist. Nobody knew where Reynaud was.
    A French officer helped the British party to find a restaurant where they took a private room and ate cold chicken and cheese, washed down by the local Vouvray white wine. Eventually, Reynaud was found, and the meeting began in the préfecture. The diminutive 62-year-old Premier, his hair in a neat centre parting, showed his strain and exhaustion. The defeatists in the French government and high command were pressing him remorselessly to sue for peace, abetted by his domineering, pro-German mistress. The Premier’s eyes twitched, and his face jumped with a tic, as he asked Churchill to release France from its undertaking not to make a separate peace with Berlin.
    The British leader replied that he must discuss this with his colleagues alone. So they went out into the ill-kept rectangular garden of the préfecture, edging round puddles under rain-sodden trees, the surroundings matching their spirits. Returning to the meeting room, Churchill said that, though he understood the difficulties the French faced, he could not agree to the request. On leaving, Churchill saw Charles de Gaulle standing at the doorway, ‘solid and expressionless’. ‘
L’homme du destin
,’ the Prime Minister said in a low voice as he passed. The future head of the Free French remained impassive – if only because he had probably not heard the words.
    That evening, the French Cabinet gathered in a château being used as the official residence of the President of the Republic, Albert Lebrun, an infirm 69-year-old who always hoped for the best – another politician said he ‘cried whenever a cloud covered the sun’. He had every reason for tears now.
    A fierce argument erupted between the Interior Minister, Mandel, and the Commander-in-Chief, Weygand, who flounced out. The pro-peace party made much of a linguistic misunderstanding arising from a remark by Churchill in French during the talks in Tours. When Reynaud had asked the Prime Minister what his attitude would be if France surrendered, Churchill had replied ‘
Je comprends
’, intending to mean that he understood his ally’s difficulties. But his words contained a dangerous ambiguity since they could be taken as indicating acquiescence. So they were promptly spun by proponents of ending the fighting as evidence that Britain agreed with the proposal to seek an armistice.
    Later that night, General Spears saw Reynaud looking ‘ghastly, with a completely unnatural expression, still and white’. His mistress stalked the corridors of the château where they were staying, throwing open doors to track down her man and press him to agree to yield to Hitler.
    On 14 June, before leaving the Loire Valley for the greater security of Bordeaux, the French Premier sought help from across the Atlantic by sending a message to Franklin Roosevelt telling him that, unless he gave a firm undertaking that the United States would enter the war in the very near future, ‘the destiny of the world will change’. But the President was running for re-election, and American public opinion was set against involvement in a European war – in one speech in the autumn, Roosevelt assured voters that ‘your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war’. It would be another eighteen months before Washington entered the conflict, and then only after being attacked at Pearl Harbor.
    On the afternoon of 14 June, as the
Lancastria
’s crew was being summoned back to duty, the Germans entered Paris. The writer, André Maurois, said France had become a bodywithout a head. Only 800,000 people remained in the city, a quarter of its peacetime population. The occupation troops behaved well,