The day was stifling, and there were panic, misery, and anxiety wherever one looked. On the road out of the city people were pushing baby carriages or pulling small carts, others were on loaded bicycles, and some were walking, carrying their children and their valises. Some were moving their families and possessions in wagons drawn by oxen. Farther on, we saw dead bodies on the side of the road, French men, women, and children who had been machine-gunned by German Stukas. Cars were lying in ditches, overturned, and men and women stood near them, weeping.
When they reached Tours more than twenty-four hours later, they had to sleep in a bordello commandeered by police for the radio’s staff. ‘In Tours, there was even greater panic than in Paris, and no one seemed to know whether the government intended to stay there or go further south.’ Drue was astounded to observe Prime Minister Paul Reynaud ignoring British envoys Lord Gort and General Ironside. Although the two Britons were supporting him against his defeatist ministers, Reynaud brushed past them to the car of his mistress, Countess Hélène de Portes. The government then left Tours without informing Radio Mondiale. Early on 13 June, Drue and her international colleagues drove south to Bordeaux in pursuit of France’s elusive leaders.
‘From the Bordeaux radio station,’ Drue recalled, ‘we sent out frantic pleas for help for France, and we tried to give people across the Atlantic some picture of the wretchedness of the refugees who were pouring into the temporary capital of France. We described the machine-gunning of these refugees on the clogged roads by low-flying German planes, and we told of the misery of the men and women who were arriving in the atmosphere of panic and confusion which was prevalent in Bordeaux.’ An American named Smitty, who had volunteered to fight for France, found himself working as a broadcaster. At one thirty in the morning on 17 June, as the Germans were bombing Bordeaux, he bellowed over the air to the United States, ‘Hear that, America, the God-damned sons of bitches are bombing us now!’
By dawn, all had changed. Philippe Pétain, dressed in the gold-braided uniform of a Marshal of France, strode into Radio France’s temporary broadcast centre in Bordeaux to deliver an important announcement. At ten o’clock in the morning, the 84-year-old ‘hero of Verdun’ stepped into the studio, where, Drue observed, ‘a boy was arranging the microphone, but he did not do it fast enough to suit the old Marshal. Pétain gave him a kick.’ As the new head of government, he announced, ‘I say that by the affection of our admirable army … [and] by the confidence of all the people, I give to France my person to assuage her misfortune … It is with a broken heart that I tell you today it is necessary to stop fighting. I addressed myself last night to the adversary to ask him if he is ready to seek with me, soldier to soldier, after the actual fighting is over, and with honor, the means of putting an end to hostilities.’ Drue was unimpressed. ‘I had stood next to him in the small broadcasting studio and had seen no signs of the broken heart he said he had when he told the French people that he had asked the Nazis for peace terms.’ Pétain had given up the fight, but Drue Tartière had not.
The scheme that Paul Reynaud and Charles de Gaulle had urged, to fight on from the colonies, did not seem far-fetched to the French people that New Yorker correspondent A. J. Liebling met between Tours and Bordeaux. Liebling was driving with fellow American reporters Waverly Root from Mutual Radio and John Elliot of the New York Herald Tribune in Root’s ‘old Citroën with a motor that made a noise like anti-aircraft fire’. They stopped for the night in the house of a garage owner in Barbezieux. Liebling wrote, ‘We had our café au lait with a professor of the local lycée in the garden of a restaurant the next morning. None of the little people one met, like the garagiste and the professor, considered that France might drop out of the war altogether or that Germany might win it. They took it for granted the Government would retain the fleet, go on to North Africa and fight from there. We weren’t so sure. The little people hadn’t seen the ministers and their mistresses.’
Reynaud’s mistress, Countess Hélène de Portes, had long urged capitulation – persuading her lover to appoint the ministers who would finally throw him out of office and end the battle. When Pétain called on France to quit, the Germans held only 10 per cent of the country. France still had its empire and a vast armada. Reynaud, de Gaulle and Churchill were urging the government to move to North Africa and fight on. Many Frenchmen had already gone to Algiers, including Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The famed aviator and writer recruited forty other pilots, commandeered a plane in Bordeaux and flew to North Africa to continue the struggle. Some French forces were counterattacking, and the Germans were taking heavier casualties than at the beginning of the invasion. But Pétain, Weygand and the rest of the new leadership called an end to the war. Eleven days after Pétain’s armistice broadcast, Mme de Portes died in a car accident.
A. J. Liebling and many other Americans went to Lisbon to take the Pan Am Clipper home. The Clipper had limited capacity only, and hundreds of Americans were waiting in Portugal for a flight. Others booked passage on ships that usually called first in South America. The neutral Portuguese capital was filling with Allied and Axis spies, as well as refugees. Liebling was staying at the Grand Hotel do Mont Estoril on 18 June, when the radio in the lobby broadcast a message from London. It was the first time Liebling heard the clear French of Charles de Gaulle: ‘The voice spoke of resistance and hope; it was strong and manly. The half-dozen weeping Frenchwomen huddled about the radio cabinet where they had been listening to the bulletins of defeat and surrender ceased for a moment in their sobbing. Someone had spoken for France; Pétain always seemed to speak against her, reproachful with the cruelty of the impotent.’
In the hotel bar, an Englishman, who proudly claimed to be a fascist and to support Franco in Spain, declared, ‘Within three years all Democrats will be shot or in prison!’ Liebling considered knocking out the man’s brain ‘with an olive pip, adapting the size of the missile to the importance of the target’. Instead, he drank a glass of Vermouth and remembered something that Jack McAuliffe, ‘the last bare-knuckle lightweight champion of the world’, had told him: ‘In Cork, where I was born, there was an old saying: “Once down is no battle.”’
SYLVIA BEACH AND ADRIENNE MONNIER heard Maréchal Pétain’s appeal for an armistice over the radio at lunchtime on Monday, 17 June. Afterwards, they reopened their bookshops until six in the evening. Adrienne sold only one book, appropriately, Gone with the Wind. Sylvia’s business was little better. Her landlord, who did not want the Germans to requisition his building and would not easily find another tenant, helped by waiving her rent. In her diary that evening, Adrienne wrote, ‘Gloomy evening. I feel defeat and that it’s going to be fascism.’ The next day, Tuesday, her concerns were more personal: ‘No meat, no butter, only a bit of pork.’ At four o’clock that afternoon, the concierge at Sylvia’s apartment and bookshop, Mme Allier, hurried across the street to tell Adrienne something was wrong. Adrienne wrote in her diary,
Sylvia, who left this morning around 9.00 on bicycle, has not yet come back. Seriously worried. Telephone the American Embassy, tell Mme Allier to go to the police station. Around 6:30 Marthe Lamy arrives on bicycle (she feels her Spanish blood rising), tell her my worry about Sylvia; she telephones the Hôpital Marmottan, where they bring those who are injured in street accidents, and the American Hospital. Around 7.00 Sylvia arrives. She had gone to Carlotta’s apartment on the boulevard Suchet, then to the American Embassy. [Carlotta Welles Briggs, Sylvia’s childhood friend, had left for the United States and asked Sylvia to guard her Paris apartment.]
Sylvia’s safe return at seven o’clock barely diluted Adrienne’s depression.