The Invisible Victory

25

'One still must eat,' said Professor Piйry gloomily in English. 'It is necessary.'

He was tall, spare, lined, dyspeptic-looking, in his late fifties, with thick grey hair brilliantined and brushed back, a slim grey moustache and a grey suit with a black band across the lapel for a relative recently dead (from peaceful causes, he explained to me). He was a physician, a specialist on the liver. I later discovered all French physicians to be specialists on the liver, an item of the self which the Frenchman is inclined to confuse with the soul.

Despite his lean and sickly appearance Professor Piйry was a hearty and fastidious eater, complemented by the most enthusiastic and finicky of cooks. We sat in the large downstairs dining-room, which was stuffy and full of Second Empire furniture. It was relieved only by a large garish colour photograph in a gilt frame of their only son Jean-Baptiste in khaki. He was a lieutenant in Intelligence liaising with the British Army, and nobody knew if he was captured, in Ramsgate or dead. We started our _potage aux lйgumes._ A Frenchman who cannot start family dinner with soup imagines his world is coming to an end, which indeed that Monday evening of June it was.

The only British troops left in France were mostly prisoners. About ten miles inland from Dunkirk, the Colme Canal flows parallel to the sea. Nearer the beaches, the Moлres Canal forms an arc, with its base a third canal, the Dunkirk-Furnes. To the east lies the River Ijzer, to the west the River Aa. These waterways made a box from which the Germans were fended while 215,000 of 250,000 British soldiers, and 125,000 of 380,000 French, were ferried away in a week by 850 freakishly variegated ships.

It was a box which could have been smashed, had not Hitler himself halted his panzers on May 23. Perhaps he wanted to spare from utter destruction the British Empire he so admired, and which might still be useful for him against the Americans. Perhaps Hermann Gцring boasted he could do the job less costlily with bombs. The notion would have pleased Hitler, because the German Army may have been the royal infant of Frederick the Great, the German Navy the Imperial child of Kaiser Wilhelm, but the Luftwaffe was the young Hercules of National Socialism. Luckily, the crooked shadow of Nelson was cast long in the Empire's sunset. Dunkirk was a British defeat, but it was a defeat which defied disaster, for our modern politicians eternally to invoke with clarion calls on their tin trumpets. It also occurred during the week when Howard Florey found that penicillin kept alive mice infected with the staphylococcus germ, which defied the sulphonamides.

Paris was full of refugees, everywhere in the streets, pathetic and desperate, sitting on their bundles with nowhere to go. The air was flecked with the soot of burning oil tanks, the fashionable area smoky with incinerated Embassy secrets. The air-raid sirens had sounded during the night, with a more tuneful gallic wail than the lugubrious London ones. And there was still no trace of Lamartine.

During the week I had no reply at his mistress's flat-she may have spied my coming-while Champier at the Institut Duhamel was plainly impatient at my adding to his more alarming problems. He gave me half a dozen addresses of Lamartine's friends in Paris, but these achieved nothing but the absorption of my time. I had no justification to call the police, and I am no policeman myself. I might as well have stayed in Oxford. It was harrowing to feel a failure, particularly one which I knew might be held severely against me for the rest of my career.

Yet those days of Dunkirk were the happiest of my life. My desires, my fantasies with Elizabeth were realized. Compatriots in danger, we huddled like two children in a thunderstorm. The defences of steely gossamer which she had wrapped round herself melted to nothing. In a French professor's house with a battle raging a hundred miles away, she gave herself to me. I use the now archaic expression deliberately, because Elizabeth could never be blown by the storm of her emotions from the course set by the compass of her mind. And there was another factor. She retained the tinselled glitter of her conversation, but her determined frivolity had been shrivelled by the war.

In the morning, she was to drive her little official Austin two hundred miles to Cherbourg, where we were assured by the Embassy that a ship of some sort would be ready to take British personnel across to Southampton. I was going with her. I had no official permission, but official permission for anything was becoming increasingly irrelevant. Meanwhile, as Professor Piйry pointed out, it was necessary to eat.

'I suppose Mussolini's going to declare war any minute now,' I observed, hardly lightening the gloom over the vegetable soup. 'The jackal on the heels of the red-mouthed lion.'

'All is not lost,' Professor Piйry declared morosely. 'The British soldiers which you took off the beach can surely remuster in England? They will return to the fight through Brest, or St Nazaire. Remember, the Germans got even nearer to Paris in 1914. We must hope for another miracle of the Marne.'

'I hear that Madame de Portes has already selected her bedroom at the Chвteau Amboise,' remarked Elizabeth rather acidly, referring to Countess Hйlиne de Portes, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud's mistress.

'The Government sees no necessity to take a holiday among the chateaux of Tours,' she was rebuked tartly by Madame Piйry, dark-haired and sharp-nosed, sitting opposite her husband. 'It is our duty to disbelieve pernicious rumours.'

Elizabeth smiled charmingly. 'Like the passengers aboard the Titanic, I suppose, madame? The captain and officers are incompetent, but if they say we shan't hit the iceberg we sleep happily in our bunks.'

As two red spots appeared on his wife's cheeks, the professor said even more gloomily, 'It is not very pleasant 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 kepi. He was pale faced, haggard, with several days' growth of beard. Madame and the professor leapt to embrace him, both weeping.

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 poilus left on the beaches, kept there by the muzzles of British rifles.'

'The poor boy is distressed,' said the professor.

'That must be untrue,' I insisted. Though it was not entirely untrue. The Welsh Guards fixed bayonets against French soldiers scrambling towards British boats.

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.