In Europe

terms of the last war, the Germans in terms of the next.
    With their Maginot Line the French had prepared themselves for an old-fashioned sitzkrieg, while the Germans came with a concept that revolved around mobility and speed: the blitzkrieg. Their army no longeradvanced at the speed at which a man or a horse could walk, but at the speed of a car, thirty or forty kilometres an hour. Their airborne landings and paratrooper campaigns – in the western Netherlands, for example – were unlike anything seen before. Their ultramodern Stukas sowed panic everywhere. In the wake of the advance hung the penetrating smell of dead bodies referred to by the German officers as ‘the perfume of battle’. At 7 a.m. on 20 May, 1940, two tank divisions from General Guderian's 19th Army Corps rolled out of Péronne in a westerly direction. By 10.00 they had reached the town of Albert. A little group of British soldiers tried to stop them there, with a barricade of cardboard boxes. At 11.00 the Germans reached Hédauville, where they were confronted by a British artillery battery armed only with dummy shells. At noon the first division took Amiens, where Guderian briefly paused to view the famous cathedral. The second division thundered on. By 4 p.m. they had reached Beauquesne, where they seized the entire map archive of the British expeditionary forces. At 9.00 that evening they reached Abbeville at last, and saw the sea by the dying light of day.
    On that one day in May, in a single movement, they had cut through all the Allied positions. The British, the Belgians and the French 7th Army – more than a million men in all – were caught helplessly with their backs to the North Sea. The civilians fled en masse: in June 1940, a quarter of the French population was on the run.
    In Picardy I look up Lucienne Gaillard, president of the Association Nationale des Anciens Combattants de la Résistance. ‘Come right away,’ she said on the phone. ‘We're just having a board meeting.’
    At her house beside the little grey church of Saint-Blimont, three older men are sitting around the table. She introduces them to me one by one: ‘He was in the Maquis, he was in the Resistance, and he's here because his father was executed.’
    ‘And you?’
    ‘At a certain point this whole house was full of British and American pilots. You must realise, I was only fifteen at the time, but I looked quite grown up for my age.’
    The table is covered with sheets of paper, neatly typed minutes, careful calculations from the bookkeeper.
    ‘Ah, the funding. In the 1950s we had 1,000 members,’ she tells me, ‘now barely 130. Every year there are fewer.’
    For the men of Saint-Blimont the war began when the mobilisation notices were posted, on 2 September, 1939. ‘My father worked in the sugar factory, he didn't have to go. Otherwise we didn't notice much of anything, not until 26 May, 1940, that is. I still remember it clearly, it was on a Sunday, the day of my First Communion. We were coming out of the church when we heard the cannons at Abbeville. We left a few days later, like everyone else. Everyone was fleeing south, by car, on horseback, in carts and pushing prams. The panic was truly amazing, all the fear from 1914–18 came back to the surface. My father had a car. We slept along the road in rubbish dumps, in the hay. My mother was heavily pregnant. She finally gave birth in Limoges.’
    Saint-Blimont emptied out almost completely. Of the 20,000 inhabitants of Évreux, barely 200 remained at home. In Lille, nine out of every ten houses were empty. There were only 800 people left in Chartres. On Monday, 10 June, there were at least 20,000 people waiting at the Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris for one of the infrequent trains going south. The afternoon papers bore huge headlines: Italy had entered the war, Italian troops had invaded the south of France. Two days later, the Swiss journalist Edmond Dubois stumbled upon an abandoned herd of cattle in the middle of Paris, their lowing echoing in the deserted streets. By the end of that week, when the Germans rolled into Paris, almost three quarters of the three million Parisians had fled. When Albert Speer visited Reims on 26 June he found a ghost town, its shutters clattering in the wind. ‘As though the lives of the townspeople had, for one mad moment, stood still; on the tables one still saw glasses, plates and cutlery, untouched meals.’
    Six to ten million French people fled their homes. The