In Europe

American journalist Virginia Cowles drove from Paris to Chartres, and everywhere along the road she saw cars that had run out of petrol. Old people, too ill or too tired to move on, lay exhausted on the ground. Halfway up a hill, a bakery van had stalled. At the wheel was a woman. While the cars behind her began honking their horns, she climbed out of the car and, surrounded by her four children, begged for fuel. No one did a thing. Finally, three men pushed the van into the deep ditch beside the road. The van fell onits side with a loud crash, the family possessions that had been tied to the roof rolled across the field. The woman screamed. Everyone drove on. It was hard to believe, Cowles wrote, that these were the citizens of Paris, the descendants of those who had fought tooth and nail for their liberty and had stormed the Bastille with their bare hands. ‘For the first time I began to understand what had happened to France. Morale was a matter of faith.’
    In London, Jean Monnet – who had by now risen to be head of the Anglo-French Coordination Committee, launched a daring, last-minute emergency plan: he wanted France and Great Britain to become one. A joint pool of shipping space had already been set up, just as in the First World War, but this time Monnet wanted to go much further. In a memorandum of less than five pages he proposed that the two countries become united: their armies, their governments, their parliaments, their economies, their colonies, the whole lot. The two countries could then no longer surrender independently. In the worst case, the 250,000 French soldiers still fighting in the west of the country could be evacuated to England, and fight on under the flag of the new union. The French fleet, by the same token, could sail to British ports and begin the struggle anew from there.
    Operating jointly, Monnet reasoned, France and Great Britain had so many more resources than Germany that, in the longer term, they could never lose the war. Especially not if they could count on support from the United States. Monnet's intentions were more than a mere gesture born of desperation. ‘For us,’ he stated later, ‘the plan was not simply an opportunist appeal or a merely formal text: it was an act which, with good luck, could have changed the course of events for the good of Europe. This is still my opinion today.’
    Monnet had an excellent relationship with both Churchill and Reynaud, and his idea, unusual though it may have been, was given serious consideration. ‘My first reaction was unfavourable,’ Churchill wrote in his war diaries. But when he introduced the proposal to the cabinet, he saw to his amazement how ‘staid, solid, experienced politicians of all parties engaged themselves so passionately in an immense design whose implications and consequences were not in any way thought out.’ Finally,Churchill agreed that the plan should be explored, as did de Gaulle – who had come to England on his own authority – and Reynaud.
    That June, the decision-making suddenly speeded up. Monnet drafted his proposal on Thursday, 13 June. The next evening he already had a correction to make: ‘Paris might fall’ became ‘Paris has fallen’. On Sunday, 16 June the final communiqué was drawn up.‘At this most fateful moment in the history of the modern world … The two governments declare that France and Great Britain shall no longer form two nations, but one, single Franco-British union.’
    Early that evening de Gaulle flew with the document from London to Bordeaux, the seat of the French government at the time. Churchill and a few members of the cabinet were to make the crossing to France that night by cruiser, to add their signatures. But while the British ministers were at Waterloo Station, already in the train for Southampton, the news came through that Reynaud had resigned. The French government had rejected the proposed union, and the war was decided. Pétain had been appointed premier. ‘It's all over,’ de Gaulle told Monnet on the phone. ‘There is no sense in pressing further. I am coming back.’ Churchill got off the train and went home. On that same night, 120 German bombers attacked England for the first time. Nine British civilians were killed, the first.
    Paul Reynaud could have been the same kind of leader as Churchill. He regarded Hitler as the Genghis Khan of the modern age, he demanded total dedication and promised that his government would ‘summon together and