Paris: The Novel

face of the onslaught. It was not so at all. The French fought heroically. But, just as had happened in the Great War before, the high command had not adapted to the latest modern warfare.That essential combination of tanks operating with air cover, on a large scale, was lacking. Even the tank division bravely commanded by Colonel de Gaulle was forced to retire in the face of overwhelming air attack from German Stukas.
    In the space of days, France lost a hundred thousand men—not casualties, but killed.
    By early June, the British forces, together with a hundred thousand French troops, were trapped against the coast at Dunkirk, while Paris lay open before the German divisions.
    In Paris, Charlie was beside himself.
    “I’m sitting here doing nothing to defend my country,” he cried.
    But his father was more realistic.
    “There is nothing useful you could have done,” he told him grimly. “The war is already over. The British are about to be annihilated at Dunkirk, and that’s it.”
    He was right—and, miraculously, wrong. Hitler, having just won the war, didn’t realize it. Fearful that his lines were overextended—they were, but the Allies had no armor to throw at them—and trusting mistakenly in the Luftwaffe to finish the British army on the huge beaches of Dunkirk, he hesitated. And thanks to this God-given but astounding military error, Paris learned days later that nearly a third of a million British and French troops had been ferried across the English Channel to safety.
    But France itself could not be saved. France was lost. By the tenth of June, people were evacuating. Roland told Marie and Charlie that they must all go down to the château. “The Germans will occupy Paris,” he said. “If they take over the apartment, so be it. But at all costs we must try to save the château.”
    They set off at dawn, but the lines of people along the roads were so great that they did not reach the château until nightfall. The following day, they heard that Paris had been declared an open city, rather than have the Germans perhaps destroy it. Five days later, the elderly General Pétain, the hero of the Great War who had secretly brought the mutiny to an end, took over as premier of France.
    “That’s good,” Roland declared. “Pétain has judgment. He’s a man one can trust.” And when, the very next day, Pétain declared an armistice with the Germans, Roland only shrugged and remarked that he didn’t see what else the old man could do.
    It had always been a source of some amusement to Roland and Charliethat Marie insisted on listening to the BBC on her wireless. The signal was not strong, but she could still pick it up at the château.
    “You spent too many years in England,” Roland would tell her with an affectionate kiss. “You believe that only the English news can be trusted.”
    But it was thanks to Marie’s prejudice that the family listened to a broadcast, arranged at short notice, that very few people in France ever heard.
    It was late afternoon on the very day after Pétain had announced the armistice that Marie called to Roland to come to the wireless at once. Charlie was already in the room, sitting with his leg stretched out on a stool.
    “There’s going to be a statement from a French officer, who has just flown to London,” she told him urgently.
    “About what?”
    “I have no idea.”
    The voice that came across the airwaves was deep, sonorous and firm. It announced, in total defiance of Pétain, that France had not fallen, that France would never surrender, but that Frenchmen outside France, in England and in France’s colonies, with the help of others including the Americans across the ocean, would restore France. And it urged all men under arms who were able to do so to join him as quickly as possible.
    The message was startling. The language in which it was delivered was as magisterial as it was simple. The voice declared that, in the meantime, though he had only just been promoted to the rank of general, he was declaring himself the legitimate government of France, in exile, and that he would broadcast again from London the following day.
    The name of the general was de Gaulle. “That’s the man who wanted more tanks,” Marie said. “The one that the English officer told me about after Munich.”
    “He’s mad, but magnificent,” Roland remarked.
    Charlie said nothing.
    But the next day, he told Roland and Marie what he proposed to do. And Marie’s heart