The first German river-crossing parties suffered heavily at the hands of French machine-gunners, but handfuls of determined men reached the western shore in dinghies, then waded through swamps to attack French positions. A sergeant named Walther Rubarth led a group of eleven assault engineers to storm a succession of bunkers with satchel charges and grenades. Six of the Germans were killed, but the survivors opened a breach. Panzergrenadiers ran across an old weir linking an island to the two banks of the Meuse, to establish a foothold on the western side. By 1730, German engineers were bridge-building, while rafts ferried equipment across. Some French soldiers were already retreating, indeed fleeing. At 2300, tanks began clattering across the first completed pontoons: the German sappers’ achievement was as impressive as that of the assault troops.
The French response was painfully sluggish, absurdly complacent. It was suggested to Gen. Huntzinger that the German assault was unfolding like that on Poland. He shrugged theatrically: ‘Poland is Poland…Here we are in France.’ Told of the Meuse crossings, he said: ‘That will mean all the more prisoners.’ Earlier that day, Gamelin’s headquarters declared: ‘[It] is still not possible to determine the zone in which the enemy will make his main attack.’ But that night General Joseph Georges, commanding the north-eastern front, telephoned Gamelin to say that there had been a rather serious upset – ‘un pépin’ – at Sedan. At 0300 on the 14th, a French officer described the scene at Georges’ headquarters: ‘The room was barely half-lit. Major Navereau was repeating in a low voice the information coming in. General Roton, the chief of staff, was stretched out in an armchair. The atmosphere was that of a family in which there has been a death. Georges got up quickly…He was terribly pale. “Our front has been broken at Sedan! There has been a collapse.” He flung himself into a chair and burst into tears.’ An officer described Gen. Georges Blanchard, commander of First Army, ‘sitting in tragic immobility, saying nothing, doing nothing, but just gazing at the map spread on the table between us’.
The decisive moment of the campaign came later that morning. The German crossing of the Meuse need not have been calamitous, had it been reversed by a swift counter-attack. But French troops assembled lethargically, then advanced hesitantly and piecemeal. Attacks by 152 bombers and 250 fighters of the RAF and the French air force failed to damage the German bridges, while costing heavy losses – thirty-one of seventy-one British bombers failed to return. F/Lt. Bill Simpson’s single-engined Battle caught fire when it crashed, and he was dragged half-naked from the flaming wreckage by his crew. Sitting shocked on the grass nearby, he stared at his hands ‘with unbelieving terror…The skin hung from them like long icicles. The fingers were curled and pointed, like the claws of a great wild bird – distorted, pointed at the ends like talons, ghostly thin. What would I do now? What use would be these paralysed talons to me for the rest of my life?’
By nightfall on the 14th three French formations around Sedan had collapsed, their men fleeing the battlefield. One of these was the 71st Division. A notorious episode passed into legend, of one of its colonels who sought to check fleeing men and was swept aside by soldiers crying: ‘We want to go home and get back to work! There is nothing to do! We are lost! We are betrayed!’ Some modern historians question the reality of this incident. Pierre Lesort, another officer of the same formation, retained a different and more heroic memory of the day: ‘I saw very well, about 800–1000 metres on my left, an artillery battery…which never stopped firing at the diving Stukas which ceaselessly attacked it; I can still see the little round clouds which its guns created in the sky around the swirling planes which continuously dispersed and returned…As for the reactions of the machine-gunners in my company, we never stopped shooting desperately at the planes.’ Yet Lesort acknowledged the progressive erosion of morale: ‘It must be said that this control of the sky by the Germans for these two days made the men discontented and impatient. At the start it was just a sort of grumbling: “Christ, there are only German planes, what the hell are ours doing?” But on the following days…one felt the growth of a kind of helpless resentment.’
Through the succeeding days, French armour launched desultory attacks on the Meuse bridgehead from the south. Gamelin and his officers made another disastrous and probably irrecoverable mistake: they failed to grasp the fact that von Rundstedt’s spearheads did not intend to continue their advance west into the heart of France, but instead were racing north, for the sea, to cut off the British and French armies in Belgium. The Germans’ ‘expanding torrent’ was now advancing across a front sixty miles wide. The French Ninth Army, charged with defending the region, had almost ceased to exist. The advancing panzer columns were acutely sensitive to the risk of an Allied counter-attack on their flanks, but the French high command lacked the will or the grip to initiate such action, as well as means to carry it out. It is mistaken to suppose that the French army offered no significant resistance to the German offensive in 1940. Some of Gamelin’s units made energetic and successful local attacks, and paid a heavy price in casualties. But nowhere did the French deliver assaults of sufficient weight to halt the racing thrusts of von Rundstedt’s armour.
Pierre Lesort described ‘an immediate impression of total disorder and shameful despair. Belongings pushed on bikes, helmets and guns out of sight, and the appearance of dazed vagrants…By the side of the road a man was standing alone, immobile. Wearing a black cap and short cassock: a military chaplain…I saw that he was crying.’ Another soldier, Gustave Folcher, wrote of encounters with men of broken units from the north: ‘They told us terrible things, unbelievable things…Some had come from as far as the Albert Canal…They asked for something to eat and drink; poor lads! They streamed on endlessly; it was a piteous sight. Ah, if those enthusiasts who go and watch the magnificent military parades in Paris or elsewhere could have seen on that morning this other army, the real one…perhaps they would understand the suffering of the soldier.’
A sense of unreality at first pervaded French public consciousness as the familiar world began to disintegrate. The Russian-born Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky described in her autobiographical novel of 1940–41, Suite française, the disbelieving response in Paris to news of stunning German advances: ‘Even though the reports were terrible, no one believed them. No more so than if victory had been announced.’ But as the truth began to be understood, panic swept the nation. Among the most terrible aspects of those days was the massed flight of civilians, which impacted as disastrously on military communications as upon soldiers’ morale. The people of eastern France had suffered German occupation in 1914; they were determined to escape another such experience. Much of the population of Rheims fled, only one-tenth of Lille’s 200,000 inhabitants stayed in their homes, and just eight hundred of Chartres’ 23,000 people after the cathedral city was heavily bombed. Many places became ghost towns.
Throughout eastern and central France, army units found themselves struggling to deploy for action amid huge columns of desperate humanity. Gustave Folcher wrote:
The people are half-mad, they don’t even reply to what we ask them. There is only one word in their mouths: evacuation, evacuation…What is most pitiful is to see entire families on the road, with their livestock they force to follow them, but that they finally have to leave in some cattle-pen. We see wagons drawn by two, three or four beautiful mares, some with a young foal which follows at the risk of being crushed every few metres. The wagon is driven by a woman, often in tears, but most of the time it’s a kid of eight, ten or perhaps twelve years old who leads the horses. On the wagon, on which furniture, trunks, linen, the most precious things, or rather the most indispensable things, have been hastily packed up, the grandparents have also taken their place, holding in their place a very young child, even a newborn baby…The children look at us one by one as we overtake them, holding in their hands the little dog, the little cat or the cage of canaries they didn’t want to be separated from.
Eight million French people abandoned their homes in the month following the onset of the German assault, the greatest mass migration in west European history. Those families who stayed in Paris found themselves repeatedly driven into shelters by alarms: ‘They had to dress their children by torchlight,’ wrote one of those who experienced them. ‘Mothers lifted small, warm, heavy bodies into their arms: “Come on, don’t be afraid, don’t cry.” An air raid. All the lights were out, but beneath the clear, golden June sky, every house, every street was visible. As for the Seine,