Witness of Woe
F one had to reduce to half a dozen volumes the enormous corpus of writings about the First World War, General Spears's Liaison Would be among the survivors. The same may not be true of Assignment to Catastrophe; but there can be no question that this d and enthralling book is of great importance. Marred as it is ere and there by a want of modesty so embarrassing to the reader hat he is astonished at the unawareness of the author, it remains a loving and convincing testimony, at first hand, of the collapse of France in 1940. General Spears was sent over to France too late to have a decisive influence on the march of events; the cracks in her military and political edifice had yawned beyond hope before he was able to touch his hat to M. Reynaud on the 25th May; he records the British Prime Minister as saying on the 31st: "What a pity Louis has-not been here a long time." But it is evident that in the few days that he spent in Paris he put to full use both his love of France and Its wide acquaintance and close friencLh.ps with French soldiers and politicians.
In many respects the career of General Spears has been turbulent; and it is greatly to be hoped that he will one di.y give us ..n account of his stewardill:p in the Levant. Meanwhile he has written a book, not devoid of panache, which does much to lift the curtain on those last two critical weeks of May, 1940, when tri.gi.dy broke over France like a green sea. General Spears is not one of those numerous wiseacres who claims to have "known all Jung that the French Army would . be no good." He is much too honest to do that. 1 am his junior by twenty-five years; I too had close relations, appro, priate to my rank, with the French Army; and the only voice 1 eve heard expressing doubts as to the ability of the French military machine to resist a German invasion was that of the French office. then attached to Sandhurst. He proved to be sadly justified; bu General Spars admits us, not to his arriere-peme,.'s, not to hiS esprit d'esealier, but to Its impressions of the time. And his gifts as a writer and as a recorder of a swiftly-mov;ng scene make this a valuable account of what has hitherto been inexplicable.
. His portraits of the dramatis personae are invaluable. Reynaud springs to I.fi: as a stout-hearted man unsure of the men behind him, so does Mandel, who .should so certainly be living at this hour; so, does the dapper Weygand, wearing, no doubt, though Genera Spears does not say so, the Sam Browne belt given him by Sir Henry Wilson, of which he was so p.-oud; Petain with his dropped eyelids sometimes on the spot and sometimes wool-gathering; Commandan Fauvelle, playing in antithesis the part of that mysterious German colonel who ruined for the Germans the Battle of the Marne in 1914; and Major Archdale, that select officer among the 'Twelve Apostles', chosen from officers of the Reserve domiciled in Paris, who made such a contrast, cool and incisive, with the confused reports reaching Paris during those desperate days.
This is a very good book. It does not explain how the French got into their plight; we share General Spears's bewilderment as he probes its full extent, as unexpected to him as to the rest of us. It will help us to insure against a similar fate ever befalling us. It will be memorable for its precise evocation of the way in which the shadows rose over Paris,,.and over the Quad d'Orsay in particular. It crystallises into history various meetings which were historic. It has an excellent account of the House of Commons during that fateful debate which was initiated by Mr. Chamberlain, but domi- nated by Mr. Amery and the late Mr. Greenwood, of which we have already some excellent accounts, notably Duff Cooper's; but far more important are the reports of the meetings of the French Cabinet, including those. with Churchill. Petain is numb, Weygand shrinks, the Italophiles reach out hopelessly under our eyes; and all the time the fact that the Allies have been defeated militarily stares us starkly in the face. What comes next is relegated to the second volume; and if the second volume is as good as this, as honest and as objective, it will be worth waiting for. But it must be more..neuratel Qeneral Redman was not an officer of the Indian Army, Mu' was Lord Gort an Irish Guardsman. General Spears's account of what happened on the stage rings true, despite inac- curacies about characters in the wings; but he should insure against our loss of confidence in him as an accurate historian, by checking on ancillary facts.
BERNARD FERGUSSON
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