In Europe

the tenets of war, General Pétain said reassuringly in 1939. After Major Charles de Gaulle entered a plea for the development of a modern and mechanised army in his book
Vers l'armée de métier
, his promotion to the rank of colonel was postponed for three years. André Maginot's life's work proved to be a huge, useless war monument. The wall stopped abruptly at the Belgian border – building had been halted due to lack of funds – and the Germans had only to march around it.
    The doors, valves, lights, levers and wheels at Fermont are still fully operational. Above the fort, amid the grazing cows, an iron trapdoor opens several times a day. The barrel of a cannon appears and revolves a few times. Everything about this mechanism and the fort has something tragic about it, like the clipper ship: the absolute cutting edge, yet nothing but a grave error in judgement, because the premise had already become a thing of the past.
    And then one had the Germans. For ten whole months in 1916 they had tried fruitlessly to take Verdun. In 1940, it took them less than a day. How could that have been?
    First there was the principle of ‘loser wins all’. The very fact that the German Army had been so greatly reduced by the Treaty of Versailles forced the generals to build up the most efficient army with the fewest possible troops. Every invention that might be of use was tried out. In this way, Germany, thanks to Versailles, had laid the foundation for an ultramodern air force as early as 1931.
    Four years later, with the help of Wernher von Braun, the army launched the twentieth century's first rocket. It reached an altitude of two kilometres.
    The Germans had also learned from their diplomatic mistakes. The danger of a new war on two fronts was, at least for the time being, skilfully ruled out. Out of the blue, Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, signed a pact in Moscow in August of 1939. Among Stalin's staff Ribbentrop had felt ‘as thoroughly at ease as among my own party members’.The Soviets sent a few hundred Jewish and anti-fascist refugees back to Germany as a token of goodwill. In mid-November, Molotov and the members of his delegation were welcomed in turn at Berlin's Anhalter Bahnhof to the solemn strains of the ‘Internationale’. Under normal circumstances, simply playing that melody was enough to obtain a one-way ticket to Dachau, but now the entire Nazi elite stood to attention. Workers waved red handkerchiefs from the windows of a neighbouring factory.
    It was only in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact finally emerged. (As late as 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev was still denying its existence.) In those protocols, both superpowers’ European spheres of influence were carefully delineated. The Soviet Union was to have its way in part of Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Bessarabia. Germany could go ahead in the rest of Poland, and in Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia and Greece. Strictly speaking, it was a non-aggression pact. In actual fact, it was a pact of pure aggression, a thoroughly worked-out scenario for the upcoming wars of conquest.
    Within weeks of the invasion on 1 September, 1939, Poland had been conquered, divided, plundered and terrorised by the Germans and the Soviets. The west of the country was absorbed into the Great German Empire, the areas around Warsaw, Krakow, Radom and Lublin were transformed into SS country. This ‘General Government of Poland’ was to be the area to which, soon enough, all Poles, Jews and other ‘non-German elements’ would be deported, and which would be ‘governed’ by the SS.
    Western Europe was still in a state of partial slumber. Belgium, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries cherished their neutrality. To describe winter 1939, the British later coined the term ‘the phony war’, a hazy state somewhere between peace and battle, the silence before what was coming. The French would have liked nothing more than to have that calm last forever. They indignantly rejected a proposal from Churchill to block supplies into the Ruhr by filling the Rhine with mines: to do that would only lead to war. At some spots along the front their soldiers had even put up signs: ‘DON'T SHOOT PLEASE, WE WON'T SHOOT EITHER!’ The British and the French did, however, assemble a joint force of 100,000 troops in March 1940 to