In Europe

dare to begin an offensive against France. In hindsight, this wilful arrogance was one of the chief reasons for the defeat.
    Other reasons, Bloch says, were found in the field of military strategy: the inflexibility of the French commanders, the inferior cooperation with the British and the disregard for information from intelligence services. It was not courage that the French lacked. At Lille, in June, the French fought fiercely to provide cover for the British retreat at Dunkirk. At Saumur, the 2,500 lightly armed cadets at the military academy had succeeded for two days in halting the advance of a German armed division, albeit with heavy losses. The statistics, too, speak of a great deal of forgotten heroism. During those first six weeks of war, 124,000 Frenchmen were killed, and more than 200,000 were wounded: that is roughly twice the number of German casualties and three times those of the British.
    Then Bloch points to a final cause: in May 1940, France was anything but a united and unified nation, determined to fight the aggressors down to the last man. Bloch describes the ranks of the French Army as he and his fellow officers experienced them: ‘Lieutenants: friends. Captains:comrades. Commanders: colleagues. Colonels: rivals. Generals: enemies.’ On the political scene, things were no different.
    In early August, Lucienne Gaillard crossed back over the line of demarcation between Vichy France and occupied France.‘It was no joke getting home. Our house had been looted while we were gone. Everything had been turned upside down.’ Her father couldn't bear the thought of his country being occupied, even though he had returned to the German part of France. He began, with minor acts of sabotage, on his own. Later he formed a group, derailed German munitions trains, joined up with de Gaulle and provided shelter for stranded pilots. But during those first years he was above all lonely and bitter. ‘To him, Vichy equalled treason.’
    During those six fateful weeks, one miracle took place: Dunkirk. The German drive went so quickly as to overwhelm not only the Belgians and the French, but also the Germans themselves. Just as General Guderian's 19th Armoured Division was about to spring the trap and drive the British into the Channel, Hitler ordered them to halt. ‘We were speechless,’ Guderian said later. There was almost no resistance. The advance posts could already see the steeples of Dunkirk. The delay lasted three days. In that way, Hitler gave the British precisely enough time to evacuate their defeated army from Dunkirk.
    The rescue operation had all the elements of a heroic drama. A bizarre fleet consisting of naval vessels, rickety fishing boats, old lifeboats, pleasure craft, brown-sailed Thames barges and a sea of private yachts was tossed together with lightning speed. Between 28 May and 4 June, 1940, this allowed 220,000 British soldiers and 120,000 Frenchman, plus 34,000 vehicles, to be brought back to England. As well as 170 dogs, for no British soldier was willing to leave behind his mascot.
    The historical accounts are marked by great discrepancies. ‘My own feelings are rather of disgust,’ a British veteran wrote years later to Walter Lord, one of those who wrote the history of that event. ‘I saw officers throw their revolvers away … I saw soldiers shooting cowards as they fought to be first in a boat.’
    ‘Their courage made our job easy,’ a naval man wrote about exactly the same situation. ‘I was proud to have known them and to have been of their generation.’ According to two officers of the local command, the organisation around Dunkirk was ‘absolute chaos’, a ‘debacle’, a ‘disgrace’. But one liaison officer saw Dunkirk as proof that ‘the British were an invincible people’.
    Today, in 1999, Dunkirk is a seaside resort like any other, with a huge plastic play-castle where ‘Les Colettes’ perform, shrieking children, perspiring mothers, ice-cream parlours and ugly apartment buildings, all of it imbued with a routine breathlessness that goes on day after day, a life off which the past rolls like water off a duck's back.
    The beach at Dunkirk is one of those spots in Europe's history where things were truly touch-and-go, where some little thing, an error of judgement on the part of a single individual, determined the course of history. For what was it that persuaded Hitler to order his troops to halt, at precisely the moment when they could have delivered