The change was expected to benefit the Allies, as Germany had virtually no foreign currency reserves; beyond the amendment, though, Roosevelt was unprepared to go. “Consistent in his inconsistencies, cold and distant behind the . . . warm personality, listening always to some private voice whose tones we can recognize but never overhear and whose advice we can imagine but never verify,” Roosevelt’s thinking was opaque, even to his closest advisers. Still, by the autumn of 1939, his views on several war-related issues seemed clear enough. He recognized that Nazi Germany posed a unique historical threat; he hoped events would educate Americans about the Nazi peril; but, as he was contemplating a run for an unprecedented third term in 1940, he was unprepared to get too far ahead of public opinion.

In the case of the Americans, Chamberlain told a colleague, it was “best not to expect anything but words.”

One morning toward the end of October 1939, a middle-aged man, burly of build and with a sharp-featured, lively face, stood in a bunker ten feet below the Maginot Line, breathing in the close air and peering through a periscope. The man’s suit, discreetly well tailored, and his speech, flavored with the sparkling vowels of the English upper classes, suggested an official of some sort—a touring diplomat perhaps, or an undersecretary of some obscure but interesting government department secreted away in a Whitehall basement. However, anyone with an eye for such things could tell from the visitor’s bearing and the informed questions he asked that he had a military background. Edward Louis Spears, KBE, retired colonel, and currently Member of Parliament for Carlisle, knew this part of northern France well. During the Great War, Spears had visited the region several times. Except for the birds that had come back grudgingly in the late 1920s and the soldiers who arrived in the 1930s to man the Maginot Line, not much had changed since Spears’s last visit in 1918. The line of raised earth that ran across the abandoned field in front of the French positions marked the remains of a trench line; the rusty objects in the field, the unexploded shells that the wet season threw up in this part of France; and the broken tree line behind the field, the aiming point of some long-ago artillery barrage.

Spears was chairman of the Anglo-French Committee, a parliamentary group created to promote Allied solidarity. Unlike the United States, France was viewed as essential to British national security, and the front-line tours and talks with French colleagues allowed committee members to assess French morale and military readiness. Spears owed his chairmanship to his unique background. Born in France of English parents in 1886, he had spent part of his childhood in the country and had headed the British military mission in Paris in the final years of the Great War. As a professional soldier, he also had an understanding of the ways in which the British and French military did and did not complement each other.

Britain had a large navy and a growing air force, but its army, decimated by budgetary cuts during the interwar years, still existed largely on paper. Presently, there were only four regular army divisions in France, all short of artillery, tanks, radios, and ammunition. Six more regular divisions would join them, upon completion of their training in Britain. But beyond those ten divisions, there was nothing available except a wilderness of conscripts and part-time reservists who would take a year or more to train up to a professional standard, and several dozen battalions of the Indian Army, who were needed in India. On a recent visit to the French High Command outside Paris, Anthony Eden, the secretary of state for the dominions, had flushed with embarrassment upon examining the High Command’s map of the Western Front. Amid the forest of tricolor flags, Eden counted only two Union Jacks. The War Office planned to create a fifty-five-division army at some unspecified date in the future, but until money could be found to arm the divisions and soldiers found to man them, the main British weapon on the Western Front would be the French Army.

The best army in the world, people said of the French Army after the Great War, and twenty years later that trope had been repeated so often, French military superiority was taken for granted. “The most perfectly trained and faithful mobile force in Europe,” Churchill had said recently, and the Bastille Day parade the previous July seemed to give proof to the first lord’s words. Under a fleshy pink summer sky, down the Champs-Élysées marched Algerian, Moroccan, and Senegalese colonial regiments without end; “cannons of all calibers . . . tanks of all sizes. . . . [While] squadrons at high and low altitude [flew] over Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to the Obelisk.” The army gave “an impression of order, discipline, irresistible force,” said one spectator. A generation later, the producers of the classic BBC series The World at War would use footage from the 1939 parade to send up the myth of French invincibility. As grainy images of the marchers flickered across the screen, the narrator, the actor Laurence Olivier, noted that the French army of 1939 relied on trains and horses for transportation. A long, stagey pause followed; then Olivier added, “especially horses.”I He was right, but he had the benefit of hindsight. In 1939, the French public and the British politicians and generals believed what Churchill believed: the French Army was incomparable.

And nothing symbolized that incomparability more than the Maginot Line. Embodying all the defensive lessons of 1914–18, the line, a series of large forts or ouvrages, was hailed as a military masterstroke, the kind of achievement only the French Army was able to execute: an impenetrable defense system capable of chewing up an invading German army at minimum cost in French lives.