They are in no account to be disturbed. Nothing is to be photographed. No one is to come near.”

In early March Mass Observation, a social research and public opinion organization, warned the government that “for the mass of people,” the war “seems increasingly pointless. A new restlessness is setting in . . . a desire for something to happen.”

In a March 25 memo to Chamberlain, Reynaud proposed something spectacular, a three-point plan to energize the Allied war effort. Point one was to provoke Germany into battle by seizing control of the Norwegian territorial waters; point two was using the German counterstroke as cover for landing troops in Norway and Sweden; and point three was the seizure of the Swedish iron ore fields. This was the most modest of the premier’s proposals. Reynaud also wanted to bomb the Russian oil fields at Baku and to send submarines into the Black Sea to stop the flow of Soviet oil to Germany. About Stalin’s likely response to such a provocative action, the memo had little to say; and about the risk of fighting a two-front war—against the Soviet Union, which had 3.4 million men under arms, and against Germany, which had 2.5 million, the memo had even less to say. Reynaud did acknowledge that “the absence of a state of war between the Allies and Russia will perhaps be seen as a legal obstacle to this enterprise [the Black Sea oil blockade],” but said, “the French Government . . . for their part, consider that we should not hesitate to set [the obstacle] aside.”

Chamberlain went “through the ceiling” when he read the memo. The British rearmament program, far behind the German program at the start of the war, had benefited from the relative peace of the past seven months, but in March 1940, the program was still a year from completion. How many British planes and tanks would get built if the Luftwaffe was over Coventry and Sheffield every night? How would the small British army survive if Stalin moved one hundred of his divisions west? The Chiefs of Staff considered the Reynaud memo of interest only as an example of the excitable French temperament. “The lack of spectacular military events tends to create pressure to undertake projects that offer little prospect of decisive successes and are calculated to impair our resources and to postpone ultimate victory. This tendency should be resisted.”

Two days later, Chamberlain was still fulminating about the Reynaud memo. At a meeting on March 27 he described himself as “horrified”; the memo conveyed “the impression of a man who was rattled and who wished to make a splash to justify his position. That Reynaud should mention submarines going into the Black Sea without mentioning Turkey [which sat on the Black Sea and had a vital interest in anything that happened there] seemed fantastic.” The prime minister’s idea of “spectacular” did not include national suicide. He wanted an action large enough to impress the Germans and engage a bored, disaffected British public, but not so large as to provoke a powerful German response.

Behind these differences lay a fundamental difference about what the Allies were fighting for. France’s war aims possessed the virtue of consistency, the imprimatur of history, and the clarity of a propaganda poster. The Reynaud government, like the Daladier government, subscribed to the Clemenceau Doctrine: “There is only one way to deal with a mad dog. Either kill him or chain him with a steel chain.” In practice, this translated into two demands: the defeat of the German Army in the field and the dismemberment of the German state so that future generations of Frenchmen could live in the peace and security denied their fathers and grandfathers. The third French demand was also a testament to the power of memory and loss. Three German wars in three successive generations had convinced the French that there was a systemic wickedness in the German character that extended to the German people; a postwar settlement would have to take this character deformity into account in meting out punishment to a defeated Germany. If the Clemenceau Doctrine shaped France’s war aims, the Treaty of Versailles shaped Britain’s. On September 3, 1939, Chamberlain went to war with the two core convictions: Germany must be taught that aggression does not pay and that it would be self-defeating to impose another Carthaginian peace on it. Look what Versailles had wrought: torchlight parades, goose steps, Poland and Czechoslovakia, concentration camps, pogroms, Hitler, Göring, Goebbels. The desire for revenge had twisted an entire generation of young Germans.

Consequently, well into the spring of 1940, Britain’s war aims were kept vague and ill defined. Was Britain fighting the Nazi regime or the German people? The government was looking into that question. Was Britain fighting for a “just [peace] for all nations, including Germany,” or to liberate Poland and Czechoslovakia? The government was looking into that as well. Was Britain fighting to end Hitlerism or just to depose Adolf Hitler? Another matter requiring careful study.