Under a Darkening Sky by Robert Lyman

Author:Robert Lyman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2018-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

Abbott Liebling joined forces with other journalists, Waverley Root, the Paris correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and then the Washington Post, and John Elliott of the Herald Tribune, to flee Paris on Monday, June 10, when the government declared that it would not defend the city. Making their way first to Tours in the wake of the departing French government, they travelled in an ancient Citroën “with a motor that made a noise like antiaircraft fire and was responsible for a few minor panics during our journey . . . ,” Liebling quipped. By the time they left Paris, the streets were empty but the railway stations remained a sea of helpless humanity, great, swirling crowds trying to secure passage out of the city.

The road was crowded with soldiers and civilians in every possible conveyance, some even on horseback. Progress was painfully slow, the roadside littered with the abandoned cars of a month of flight. Government departments had requisitioned the remaining city buses, each full to the gunwales. “Some of the girl stenographers and clerks,” Liebling noted, “appeared to be enjoying the excursion.” Everyone kept their eyes nervously peeled at the sky, but on this day the Luftwaffe were busy elsewhere, and the only planes overhead had French roundels. At Orléans they, too, attempted to find a place to sleep in a local house of ill repute, but had no luck. They were all full. “They are so tired,” the sous-mattresse of one place told Liebling compassionately, “that some of them are actually sleeping.” The little group slept in the car.

It was clear to all that as an alternative site of government, Tours was a mistake. It was too close to Paris, and it was undefended. There was insufficient accommodation for each of the departments of state, let alone the wives and “flustered and indignant” mistresses. Bordeaux or Biarritz were the obvious options. Four days later—the day the Germans unfurled gigantic Nazi flags atop the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, and the Quai d’Orsay—the massive cavalcade packed up and headed south, for Bordeaux. They stayed the night en route in the delightful walled village of Barbezieux, where a local teacher and garage owner assured them that France would carry on fighting. There was no notion in the minds of ordinary French men and women that their government would ever surrender to barbarism and leave them to fight the Germans alone. It was inconceivable. The remainder of the army and fleet would go to Britain and North Africa, and continue the fight from there.

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