The line also had its critics, among them Colonel Charles de Gaulle, a leading proponent of armored warfare, who warned that in the next war, France would not be fighting the German army of 1914. But de Gaulle’s warnings were ignored. A champion of the offense, the prickly colonel was viewed as out of step with the French public, who remembered the offensive battles of 1914, when as many as twenty-seven thousand men had been killed in a single day. Never Again.

When anyone asked how France, with barely half Germany’s population (39 million versus 80 million) and only a third of its steel production (6.6 million tons versus 19 million tons) could hope to prevail in a new conflict, the answer was always the same: the Maginot Line. In the interwar years, belief in the Maginot Line became the principal article of faith in the French catechism of war. Whenever its effectiveness was questioned, defenders would set upon the heretics with a fury. They would point to the twelve to sixteen miles of artillery, antiair, and machine-gun emplacements that made up each strongpoint in the system, and ask how the Boche could hope to penetrate such a killing field. And the defenders were right: the Germans could not, not if they made a 1914-style infantry attack. But a mobile army led by tank columns could maneuver through gaps in the line left by poor planning and budgetary constraints. From Switzerland in the south to Luxembourg in the north, the French border bristled with defenses, except along the Belgian border, the German invasion route in 1914.

There were also skeptics who questioned the commitment of the French political class to the war. The parties of the right viewed communism, not Nazism, as the main threat; the French Communists viewed capitalism as the greater evil; and, between the two extremes—in the broad middle of French politics—there was equivocation and division about the war. Some prominent members of the center-right and center-left parties, such as Georges Mandel, the minister of the colonies, and Paul Reynaud, the minister of finance, supported the war without reservation. Others, such as Georges Bonnet—who, though no longer foreign minister, remained an influential figure—and Pierre Laval, a prominent French senator, regarded the new contest with Germany as tantamount to national suicide; and Laval and his followers in particular were working energetically behind the scenes to reach an accommodation with Hitler.

Finally, there were the French people.

On the early November day Spears arrived in the capital for talks with senior French politicians, the boulevards and cafés were crowded, and every radio in every sidewalk café seemed to be blaring out Maurice Chevalier’s new hit, “Paris Reste Paris.” But this Paris of barrage balloons, sandbag emplacements, and flics (French slang for policeman) with tommy guns did not feel like the Paris that Spears knew. There was no energy or gaiety in the crowds, no silhouette of the Eiffel Tower illuminating the night sky, no noisy American tourists, and almost no young or middle-aged men, except at the railway stations, where conscripts as old as forty-five and fifty were boarding trains for the front. The Champs-Élysées was bedecked in tricolor flags, and periodically a voice on the radio would announce, “We shall prevail because we are stronger,” but not many people found the voice convincing. There was more than a grain of truth in the observation that on September 3 France had gone “to war looking over her shoulder, her eyes seeking peace.” Hitler’s October 6 speech had produced such a clamor to end the war that for a time William Bullitt, the American ambassador, feared the Daladier government would be unable to resist it. “In this city of bronze memorials and dreadful rolls to the dead,” wrote Janet Flanner, the New Yorker’s Paris correspondent, there are “millions . . . [who] continue to think [war] could be avoided even after it has been officially declared.”

The day after his arrival, Spears told Jean Giraudoux, the minister of information, that he was surprised at how much anti-British sentiment he had encountered in Paris. It is the fault “of German propaganda,” Giraudoux said, which was not exactly a falsehood, but not exactly the truth either. Comparing the French and British war efforts in October 1939, the average French man or woman could be forgiven for thinking there was still truth in that old Great War jibe “The British intend to fight the war with French soldiers.” France was fully mobilized; its people were working extended wartime hours, paying wartime taxes that undercut their standard of living—and every able-bodied male fifty or younger was being mobilized. By contrast, Britain had yet to institute rationing, had raised taxes only two shillings in the twenty-shilling pound, had confined conscription to men in their twenties, and had not yet put its industry on a full wartime footing. In the second month of the war, the British unemployment rate still stood at near depression levels: 1.4 million men. Toward the end of the conversation, Giraudoux did permit himself one mild criticism: he told Spears that anti-British feeling in the capital might subside if fewer British soldiers were seen on leave in Paris and more at the front.

A few days later, while visiting Georges Mandel, an old acquaintance from the Great War, Spears asked how committed Édouard Daladier, the French premier, was to the war. Spears had heard rumors that the Bull of Vaucluse possessed “the horns of a snail.” Mandel chuckled at the question, then made one of his rare forays into humor: “No truer quip had been evolved in the Chamber [of Deputies].”

Not long after Spears returned to London, the Chamberlain government canceled the annual Armistice Day celebration at the cenotaph in Whitehall. The announcement set off a debate in the offices of a London pacifist group. “If we win this war,” said a member of the group, “shall we have another Armistice Day and a new monument to the Glorious Dead? Or shall we again contrive to end the war at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, so as to save inventing another ceremony?”

Neither, replied a colleague. “Ever seen the French monument to the dead of 1870 [the Franco-Prussian War] in the churchyard at Camiers? After the last war, they economized by adding a brief inscription commemorating the heroes of 1914–18. We shan’t have any money when we’ve won this war—so we shall probably just have to do the same.”

I. In fairness, the German army also relied heavily on horse power.

CHAPTER THREE

EUROPE IN WINTER

In January 1940, the war was entering its fifth month and the only fighting to be found in Europe was closer to the Arctic Circle than to France. The previous September, when the war began, Josef Stalin looked west and saw peril everywhere. Germany—despite the Soviet-Nazi Nonaggression Pact—represented the gravest danger, but a conflict with anti-Communist France and Britain was not beyond the realm of possibility.