The Horror of Love (17 page)

In Rabat, Gaston’s grief over Mers el-Kebir was compounded by the news that his brother Jean-Paul had been captured and interned in a camp in Silesia, where he was to remain until 1941. Another blow was the death of Marcel Diamant-Berger, who had been wounded fighting in the Vosges mountains with the 82nd Infantry Regiment. Gaston was now desperate to leave North Africa, and telegraphed De Gaulle to that effect. Destiny called in five words: ‘Come as soon as possible.’ But how? Through a former ministerial colleague, Yvan Martin, he managed to obtain a pass which allowed him to spend a weekend
in Tangiers. The city at that time was a parody of a Graham Greene novel, its hotels – including the grand Minzah, whose paintings Gaston characteristically took the time to admire – chock-full of spies of every nationality, frantically spying on one another.

Evading the boozing spooks was not easy, but Gaston made contact with the British consul-general, Gascoigne, who provided a plane. At dawn on an August morning, Gaston took off for Lisbon, where he found a former companion of his Sciences Po’days, François de Panafieu, second secretary to the French Embassy. Evidently infected by the atmosphere of Tangiers, when his university friend suggested he come to the Embassy, he replied with mysterious relish: ‘I’m still visible, but soon I won’t be.’ They met instead at François’s home and agreed on an official story, assiduously gossiped about by the Embassy staff, that Palewski would shortly be returning to Vichy. Gaston was so disheartened at this point that he asked if he would have time to reach London before the Nazis did, but the British ambassador, Sir Walford Selby, reassured him and showed him the plane in which he would escape. The next day at dawn, he was in England where, almost immediately, Winston Churchill summoned him to Downing Street.

As Gaston stepped into the Cabinet office, Churchill launched into a eulogy for the honour of France ‘with a passionate and poetic eloquence, as a lover addressing a lost mistress – “La France! La France! How could she have let herself be conquered? … how could she have so abandoned herself?”’ The effect was rather spoiled by the fact that Churchill was wearing a peculiar pair of blue combinations, but for a few moments both men gave way to their emotions. The prime minister then asked Gaston’s opinion as to the responsibility of the British in the fall of France. They discussed the effects of German propaganda, the implications of Mers el-Kebir, and Gaston stressed the importance of a British promise not to appropriate the French colonies. Churchill then became confidential, lit a cigar and asked Gaston whether the former minister Camille Chautemps,
presently at Lisbon, ought to be permitted to come to Britain. Gaston argued forcefully that Chautemps, instrumental in the removal of Reynaud, was responsible for the idea of the armistice and the institution of the Vichy regime. He added that all those who had retained a friendship for Britain in their hearts would be disgusted by Chautemps’s appearance in London. Churchill thanked him, and took his advice.

Gaston’s next call was paid to Sir Orme Sargent, the director of political affairs at the Foreign Office.

‘Finally!’ Sir Orme greeted him. ‘Someone who knows De Gaulle.’

English civil servants, he told Gaston, were confused by and sceptical of the general. They saw Free France as little more than a fantasy which could not endure for long. Gaston explained urgently that De Gaulle was the only French general with any real grasp of the political situation, and that during the period of defeat, when the French government had fled, he had been the only man who had stood firm. Working himself into a splendid fit of rhetoric, Gaston declared: ‘I have always seen our only hope in him … At Bordeaux, I met old friends, destroyed by the defeat. They bowed their heads and said to me “It’s finished.” I answered them “No! Nothing is finished! For there is De Gaulle! De Gaulle! De Gaulle!”‘ His rousing speeches performed an essential service to De Gaulle, whose fanatical hauteur had given the impression to many that he might be more than a little mad. As an old friend, who had believed in the general’s cause for so long, Gaston was able to use his excellent English, his urbane charm and his knowledge of English culture to convince the British of De Gaulle’s credibility.

He had missed De Gaulle by days. On 31 August, the general had embarked at Liverpool for Dakar. De Gaulle was adamant it was essential that the Free French begin their fight as soon as possible on French soil, explaining to his staff on 15 July that he planned to establish the capital of the ‘empire at war’ in Africa. Several French colonies had already declared for him: Tahiti, Chandernagor, New Caledonia and New Hebrides. On 27 July
he put out a call to the remaining territories of the French empire to join him. By the end of August Chad, Cameroon, the Congo and Ubangi-Shar had rallied to the general, who had recognized rather before Hitler did the crucial role that Africa was to play in the war. Free French territory had suddenly expanded from the space occupied by De Gaulle’s feet to immense swathes of Africa, of which De Gaulle believed Dakar to be the crucial locus.

De Gaulle’s attempt to take Dakar was a disaster. Arriving with his pathetic little mongrel fleet, he tried the first phase of his plan (unfortunately codenamed Happy), which was to take the port without violence. The governor general turned a machine-gun on the Free French negotiators and imprisoned the leaders of Gaullist demonstrations in the city. After some halfhearted shelling of the Vichy ship
Richelieu
, a small landing party was put ashore, and three Free French were killed. De Gaulle had no wish to pit Frenchman against Frenchman and he and his British colleague, Admiral Cunningham, agreed to retreat. Churchill countermanded this, goaded by the British press and the scorn of Washington, and Dakar was shelled, resulting in severe damage to a ship from each side and the loss of 2,000 lives, half of them inhabitants of Dakar, 200 of them French. Some observers suggested that De Gaulle came to the brink of suicide at this point, though Churchill had defended him in the Commons, taking full responsibility for the debacle and reaffirming his trust in the general. The African adventure did produce some successes. De Gaulle was greeted by enthusiastic crowds in Cameroon and Chad on his way back to London, Vichy troops surrendered to Philippe Leclerc de Hautecloque (abruptly renamed Leclerc) at Gabon and the general felt confident enough to create the first Free French decoration, the Ordre de la Libération.

Gaston and De Gaulle were reunited on 18 November 1940. De Gaulle beamed with joy when he saw his old friend and immediately asked him if he would take the role of director of political affairs of Free France. It was a dauntingly broad
portfolio. Reporting directly to De Gaulle, Gaston was to be responsible for gathering and exploiting information concerning the political situation in France and its empire, with the aim of penetrating every aspect of ‘political, social, religious, economic, professional, intellectual’ life and emphasizing the necessity of a united national interest. Foreign affairs, insofar as they had an impact on French politics, were also to be closely considered. Accordingly, Gaston’s bureau was to be divided into three sections: liaison with the Allied information services, action in France and the empire and liaison with the direction of foreign affairs.

Strategically, the rallying of the African territories had greatly strengthened the position of the Free French with their allies. They could offer air and land routes to the Sudan, Libya and Egypt, favourable trade in essentials like coffee, rubber, palm oil and cotton and protection for Southern Atlantic naval bases. Less positive was the effect of Dakar on the already precarious relationship between De Gaulle and Roosevelt.

If Nancy Mitford’s subsequent vociferous loathing for Americans had a political source, it was Gaston’s accounts of the contempt with which De Gaulle believed he had been treated by the American president. When Gaston had first arrived to join the Free French in London, the general had remarked: ‘The London French, my dear fellow, fall into two groups: those who are in the United States and those who are getting ready to leave.’ From the first, as America continued to recognize Vichy France, the States represented a threat to De Gaulle’s authority, the French empire and the potential legitimacy of France’s position in a post-war Europe. Though their views on the enervated state of the French body politic in the Thirties were essentially similar, the mutual suspicion and dislike that prevailed between the two leaders, compounded by what De Gaulle saw as a lengthy chronology of affront, culminating in the exclusion of France from the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks summit and her absence from the Yalta, San Francisco and Potsdam conferences, compromised their collaboration throughout the war and De Gaulle’s
American policy after it. Gaston had strong views on American cultural depravity and the nastiness of ‘le high grade’ pork supplied in rations after the liberation, but his attitude was affable compared to De Gaulle’s aggrieved aggressiveness, while his genius for diplomacy contributed significantly to the maintenance of this most fragile, volatile and crucial of relationships.

11

POOR FROGS

‘T
hey’re a dirty lot. I used to be in a hotel as a chambermaid and we had to take them. They ruined all the nice rooms in no time.’ This comment, recorded by Mass Observation from a Cricklewood resident, was typical of the dislike and prejudice faced by many of the 4,000 French refugees who had managed to make their way to London between May and June 1940. Prior to the war, MO reports suggested that the Germans were regarded more favourably by many British people than the French. Throughout the Thirties, the Francophobe stereotype of the bearded, lubricious Frenchman had been associated with a suspicion of aggressive militarism; after May 1940, this was replaced with a contempt for their effete passivity, though the lubricity remained. The bureaucratic chaos the refugees found in Britain after Dunkirk was little better than that they had fled. The British authorities’ response was well intentioned but badly organized, accommodation and billeting allowances had been planned for but not yet put in place.

The majority of refugees were mothers with children and young men, predominantly from reserved occupations, and the latter, in the Phoney War atmosphere of paranoia about fifth columnists and parachuting nuns, were immediately perceived as a potential threat. Most were rounded up into ill-staffed camps in the south-east, Midlands and north-west, where enforced idleness and insanitary conditions had a deleterious effect on morale. De Gaulle toured several such camps, where the men slept under canvas, observing that they felt betrayed after
Dunkirk and were conscious of ill treatment. In particular they were distressed by the compulsory presence of armed guards and barbed-wire fencing. ‘I feel ashamed of being a British woman, ’ wrote one camp visitor, ‘every time I go to the camp and see … that awful infirmary.’
¹

The fall of France had come as a profound psychological shock to the British. ‘Bleeding French’ was a remark heard by many Mass Observation reporters. The British didn’t want the refugees, and the refugees didn’t want to be there. For many Londoners, the arrival of escapees at the capital’s stations was the first evidence, in the eerie calm of those first months, that a war was being fought at all. George Orwell described the silence with which they were greeted, a silence remembered also by the diarist Mollie Panter-Downs, who noted that the French defeat was so overwhelming it could not be spoken of. Paul Johnson vividly recalls the plight of servicemen who had fled Dunkirk, ‘destitute, with nothing but their greatcoats’. While MO reports suggest that the overwhelming attitude to the French, including their suspiciously unknown leader, was negative and mistrustful, many did express pity for the refugees’ plight. Station porters carried their pathetic belongings for nothing, and advertisements for missing family members were placed free of charge. In the French press, at stations and in reception centres, heartbreaking announcements began to appear: ‘Grillot, Françoise, age 2 and a half (family of 12), from Luyères was with her elder sister in a military bus. Her sister was very seriously hurt … she fainted and since that moment, no news of little Françoise, who has disappeared.’

No statistics exist as to the number of children, of a total of 90,000 who were separated from their parents after the invasion, arrived orphaned in Britain.

One of Gaston’s first duties was liaising between the Free French and Vere Ponsonby, the 9th Earl of Bessborough, head of the newly created Department of French Welfare. Bessborough supervised propaganda concerning De Gaulle’s movement, the welfare of French civilians and refugees and the occupation or
repatriation of members of the French armed forces if they chose not to join the Free French. Recruitment was initially poor. Of 11,550 French sailors in Britain at the outbreak of war, only 882 opted for the Free French and just 300 from a permanent expat population of 10,000. The military was better represented, with 2,000 joining by July 1940. What to do with the remainder was Bessborough’s headache, and it quickly became Gaston’s. Their job was complicated because the French Welfare department was the administrative centre for no fewer than twenty-eight separate charities and associations that concerned themselves with the French, as a consequence of which Bessborough’s days at his headquarters at the Savoy were mostly spent arbitrating internal quarrels.