The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (255 page)

He had begun to understand the Maginot mind. It was the mind of a nation which did not want to lose a war, but didn’t much want to win either. The French soldiers of 1914 had lusted for revanche, the return of Alsace and Lorraine, lost when their grandfathers had been overwhelmed in the Franco-Prussian War. The two provinces had been made French again at Versailles, and now the country had no war aims. In denying an appropriation to enlarge the republic’s tank corps in 1935, the minister of war had asked a wildly cheering Chamber of Deputies, “How can we still believe in the offensive when we have spent milliards to establish a fortified barrier? Would we be mad enough to advance beyond this barrier upon God knows what adventure?” Yet everyone—including the Generalstab plotters meeting beneath the murmuring pines and hemlocks in Zossen—knew France’s basic war plan. Because the minister of war had discounted the threat through Switzerland, the Maginot Line was expected to hold the enemy at bay while other poilus valiantly drove into Belgium to counterattack the attacking Germans. But if the counterattacking poilus lacked élan vital, their assault would fail. Feeling safe behind the line, “like the lotus-eating mandarins of Cathay behind their great Wall,” as one writer put it, France had lapsed into languor, a spiritless lassitude which was the exact obverse of the lusty, singing, marching young Nazi soldiers across the border.
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During his tour of the line Churchill, like most visiting VIPs, confined his remarks to senior officers. Indeed, he would have given grave offense had he done otherwise. Spears tells us that he was “pleased with the aspect of the men…. He knew how to look every man in the eyes as he passed him, thus convincing him he had been recognised by someone already known, even in France, to be a very important person.” But it is a pity Winston could not have talked to them, too, and later he said as much. The spirit of the Marne had, he realized, “exhausted its mission and itself in victory.” It was as though the Third Republic had become a different country. Bravery, he noted, was now associated in the great majority of French minds with the futile butchery of 1914–1918. In metropolitan France alone 27 percent of the country’s young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven had not returned from the trenches. Simone de Beauvoir tells of a Dr. Lemair, who had operated on countless poilus under appalling conditions and who, on returning home, “took to his bed and never got up again.”
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No one knew how many of the survivors of the war, the men who should have been guiding France in 1939, had been drained, exhausted, broken at the front. But the deterioration in the army’s leadership had been shocking. The Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre, whose members would become senior generals when war broke out, was hopelessly entangled in red tape and bureaucratic muddle—
paperasse
, as the French call it. Tanks were despised (as mortars, machine guns, and warplanes had been despised in 1914). In 1921 Marshal Pétain, then supreme commander, had dismissed the future of armored warfare in nineteen words: “Tanks assist the advance of the infantry by breaking static obstacles and active resistance put up by the enemy.” His successors endorsed this finding. As Charles de Gaulle had discovered in the early 1930s, no one in the Conseil Supérieur understood revolutionary air power and the implications of armored vehicles which could now “be made capable of withstanding artillery fire and could advance a hundred miles a day.” Indeed, not a single French general had wanted to know. De Gaulle’s memoranda had been returned to him unread, and when he published his controversial views in
Vers l’armée de métier
his name had been struck from the promotion list.
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During his glimpse of the Maginot Line in 1936, Churchill had thought the Conseil’s doctrine sound. He later wrote that, lacking “access to official information for so many years,” he had not comprehended “the violence effected since the last war by the incursion of a mass of fast-moving enemy armour. I knew about it, but it had not altered my convictions as it should have done.”
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Indeed it should. He had fathered the tank in 1915, when it had been ridiculed as “Winston’s Folly.” And he was the last man in Parliament to plead backbencher lack of “access to official information.” It is doubtful that any man at the cabinet table, including the prime minister, was as well-informed about the War Office, Admiralty, and RAF, all of which he had headed at one time or another, and whose staffs included officers who saw to it that he was kept abreast of the latest military developments. Moreover, as chancellor of the Exchequer he had witnessed the spectacular maneuvers of Britain’s Experimental Armoured Force on Salisbury Plain in 1927, which vindicated advocates of high-speed tank forces. Nevertheless, as late as 1938 Churchill had written that “the tank has, no doubt, a great part to play; but I personally doubt very much whether it will ever again see the palmy days of 1918…. Nowadays the anti-tank rifle and the anti-tank gun have made such strides that the poor tank cannot carry thick enough skin to stand up to them.”
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Other views had been suggested to him. The most imaginative came from Captain Basil Liddell Hart. After the Armistice, Liddell Hart had served on the team which drafted the new infantry training manual. Then, and later as military correspondent of
The Times
, he had set forth the first practical alternative to the entrenched, deadlocked siege warfare he had survived. In its place he proposed an “expanding torrent” offensive, spearheaded by swift, mobile masses of heavy tanks and backed by equally versatile self-propelled guns and infantry, bound for the enemy’s rear aboard armored carriers. Liddell Hart urged abandonment of methodical siege techniques, which involved hitting the enemy where he was strongest. Instead, attackers would search for a weak spot in the foe’s defenses and pour through it with mobile firepower, creating new fronts deep in the enemy’s rear.

Churchill’s French was weak, and he had not been exposed to de Gaulle. But he and Lloyd George had met Liddell Hart in Morpeth Mansions and heard him out. At least, Lloyd George had. In his memoirs Liddell Hart wrote: “It was… very noticeable that Churchill’s mind was apt to focus on a phrase, while Ll. G. seized the point and followed on to the next point…. Moreover, Churchill liked to do most of the talking in any discussion.” Winston was usually hospitable to military innovations. If he had been slow to grasp the new role of air power, he understood the fragility of England’s air defenses. On the ground, however, he still clung to the continuous front school of military thought, remembering when it broke Ludendorff’s line and forgetting the four years of heartbreaking, bloody failures before. Perhaps the answer to his inconsistency lay in his youth and his romantic idealization of it (“Twenty to twenty-five!” he often said. “Those are the years!”). Tanks were replacing horses, and at heart he remained a young officer of hussars. In a nostalgic chamber of his mind, Victorian colonial wars, with their negligible casualties—negligible, that is, for the British—would always glitter. He rejoiced in the memory of magnificence and turned away from the squalid, forgetting that the only moral judgments in war are made by the victors, and victorious armies are led by those who have mastered the latest, most efficient tools of their trade.
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Nevertheless, he possessed a rare gift for strategy, and he had been more attentive in Morpeth Mansions than Liddell Hart had thought. Spears’s most vivid recollection of their eve-of-the-war examination of the Maginot Line, with long sessions of men bowed over map tables, was of Churchill spotting the great weakness in the French defense system. His mouth pursed, his gaze was fixed “as if,” Spears wrote in his account, “he were crystal-gazing.” He had been smiling; now the smile vanished and he shook his head ominously as he put his finger on the shoulder of the Maginot, where it ended near Montmedy and was extended by field works opposite the Ardennes forest. “He observed,” recalled Spears, “that he hoped these field works were strong.” He understood that Marshal Pétain had once remarked that the Ardennes was “impassable to strong forces.” That view, said Winston, was now “very unwise.” He asked Georges to “remember that we are faced with a new weapon, armour in great strength, on which the Germans are no doubt concentrating, and that forests will be particularly tempting to such forces since they will offer concealment from the air.”
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Spears could not remember Georges’s reply, but neither Georges nor Weygand acted upon, or even made note of, Churchill’s advice. Yet in its heavily guarded headquarters outside Berlin, the German high command was studying that same spot in the Ardennes. Using tanks, the generals believed, they could outflank the Maginot Line, take Paris, and force the French to their knees—accomplishing in six weeks what their fathers had vainly sought in four years of bloody, frustrating siege warfare.

On Friday, August 18, when Ambassador Schulenburg was climbing walls in Moscow, trapped between his führer’s demand for a windup of treaty negotiations with Russia and Stalin’s dawdling, Spears and Churchill parted, Spears returning to London and Winston traveling fifty miles north of Paris to Dreux and the château of Consuelo Balsan, born a Vanderbilt and for twenty-six years a duchess of Marlborough. Her 1921 divorce from Charles (“Sunny”) Marlborough had been amicable, and the door to her home was always open to Winston and his family. Churchill was aware that galleys and even page proofs were accumulating on his Chartwell desk, but despite his outward display of vigor, he was weary. Believing as always that “a change is as good as a rest,” he had decided to paint. Clementine and Mary, now approaching her seventeenth birthday, awaited him there. Because they were “conscious that the sands of peace were fast running out,” Mary recalls, their “appreciation of those halcyon summer days was heightened: there was swimming and tennis (so greatly enjoyed by Clementine) and
fraises des bois
; Winston painted a lovely picture of the exquisite old rose-brick house; we visited Chartres cathedral and were drenched in the cool blueness of the windows.” As with a song that runs through one’s mind, she kept remembering a line from Walter de la Mare: “Look thy last on all things lovely.”
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Among Consuelo’s other guests was Paul Maze, the professional painter and an old friend of Winston’s. In his diary Maze noted: “We talked about his visit to the Maginot Line with Georges—very impressed by what he saw.” At dinner he was cross, “but with reason,” Maze thought, “as the assemblée didn’t see any danger ahead. As [Sir Evan] Charteris was walking up the stairs to go to his bed he shouted to me, ‘Don’t listen to him. He is a warmonger.’ ” On two successive days he and Winston painted together. Maze wrote that as he worked alongside him, Churchill “suddenly turned to me and said: ‘This is the last picture we shall paint in peace for a very long time.’ What amazed me was his concentration over his painting. No one but he could have understood more what the possibility of war meant and how ill-prepared we were.” As they worked, Winston would remark from time to time on the relative strength of the opposing armies. “They are strong, I tell you, they are strong.” Then, Maze wrote, “his jaw would clench his large cigar, and I felt the determination of his will. ‘Ah,’ he would say, ‘with it all, we shall have him.’ ”
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After three days at Consuelo’s château Winston suddenly left. Later, in his memoirs, he wrote that he “decided to go home, where at least I could find out what was going on,” promising “my wife I would send her word in good time.” It was August 22; the Germans and the Russians had announced that final negotiations for their nonaggression pact would begin tomorrow. Now it was official: the triple alliance was dead. The Allies could expect no support from the U.S.S.R. The situation was even worse than they thought. Not only would the pact provide that if either country should “become the object of belligerent action by a third party,” the other country would “in no manner lend its support to this third power”; in a secret protocol the signatories agreed to respect each other’s “spheres of influence in Eastern Europe”—the basis, a month later, for the division of conquered Poland between the Soviet Union and the Reich. Even so, the impact of the impending treaty on Englishmen may be roughly compared to that of Pearl Harbor upon Americans. Nicolson, learning of it over the 6:00
P.M.
BBC news, described Britain’s shock: “This smashes our peace front and makes our guarantees to Poland, Rumania and Greece very questionable. How Ribbentrop must chuckle. I feel rather stunned…. I fear that it means we are humbled to the dust.” Malcolm Muggeridge wrote: “Groping down darkened streets, dimly it was felt that a way of life was failing, its comfortable familiarity passing away never to reappear.”
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Churchill paused in Paris to lunch with Georges, who produced figures on the strength of the opposing armies, including their fighting spirit. “The result impressed me so much,” Winston later wrote, “that for the first time I said: ‘But you are the masters.’ ” The general replied: “The Germans have a very strong army,” adding cryptically: “We shall never be allowed to strike first.” French politics, in short, ruled out a French preemptive strike into the Ruhr after war had been declared—Poland’s only hope and also, as it turned out, France’s. Apparently Winston missed these implications; he left Paris in a cheerful mood. Leaving Dreux, he had seemed depressed, and Maze had given him a note to be read after he was on his way: “Don’t worry Winston. You
know
that you will be Prime Minister and lead us to victory.”
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