Books: In Lieu of Zola

I SAW IT HAPPEN IN NORWAY—Carl J. Hambro—Appleton-Century ($2.50).

J’ACCUSE!—THE MEN WHO BETRAYED FRANCE— André Simone—Dial ($2.50).

TRAGEDY IN FRANCE—André Maurois—Harper ($2).

EUROPE IN THE SPRING—Clare Boothe—Knopf ($2.50).

There is no Zola to describe The Debacle of 1940. But the eyewitness reports have already begun. Four important books now report how Norway was seized, why Holland fell, why France folded. One is by a Norwegian (Carl J. Hambro). Two are by Frenchmen (Andr Maurois, André Simone). One is by a U. S. woman (Clare Boothe).

Carl J. Hambro is President of the Norwegian Storting (Parliament). At one o’clock in the morning of April 9, his wife woke him up. There was an air-raid alarm. The Nazis had come. President Hambro (now in the U. S.) writes a simple, straightforward, courageous account of the fight of a small neutral (Norway had no standing army) for survival, of heroic defense by civilian reservists against tanks, of the Norwegian air force (115 planes) against the Nazi air armada. He describes defenseless villages bombed out of existence, King Haakon and Crown Prince Olav machine-gunned from the air, incendiary bombs dropped on the red cross on a hospital roof. Much of the book is the story of the Norwegian Government’s retreat to the north, its efforts to establish a front there. Except for the case of Quisling, “a very well-read man with a weakness for German philosophy,” Hambro specifically denies that treason played an important part in Norway’s fall. Such charges, says he, are real fifth calumny. He says all the Norwegians were brave.

The writer who hides his identity under the pseudonym André Simone may be Pertinax (André Geraud), André Gide, André Malraux, Georges Mandel, Geneviève Tabouis. All deny that they wrote J’Accuse! The book is a lurid charge that most of France’s political and military leaders were traitors—those who were not were dupes. A good deal of the charge is based on whispers from Senators, confidences from Cabinet Ministers, tips from newspapermen.

One of Author Simone’s chief complaints is that the French general staff did not rely on the Red Army during the Munich crisis. Forgotten by Author Simone apparently is the fact that a year before Munich the Soviet Government officially announced that it had executed its leading marshal and seven generals for high treason, presumably with the Germans. J’Accuse! may be an offensive-defense from the left against mouthing charges that the Popular Front was responsible for lowering French plane production to 38 planes a month in 1937; that after the signing of the Berlin-Moscow pact French Communists sullenly sabotaged the defense industry; that the battalion of Communists in General Corap’s Ninth Army caused the German break-through by turning tail as soon as the Nazis appeared.

Charges of leftish sabotage are made by André Maurois (Tragedy in France), famed author of Ariel and Byron. Like Hambro, Maurois insists that the “actual traitors . . . were not at all numerous. . . .” He gives four reasons for the debacle: 1) stupid industrial mobilization which permitted irreplaceable skilled workers to be drafted, so that Renault (tanks and trucks) was reduced from 30,000 workers to some 7,000; 2) engineers and financiers thought World War II was World War I, built factories which could not turn out essential weapons until 1941 or ’42; 3) strategy was planned for a war of position: the Germans made it a war of movement; 4) failure of morale resulting in sabotage by Communist workers, the discouragement of small employers whose profits the Government had practically wiped out. For next time Author Maurois offers nine suggestions, four of which are: 1) a nation must be ready to die for its liberties or it will lose them; 2) political parties are passengers on the same boat—if one wrecks it, all will go down; 3) youth needs protection against teachings which weaken the country; 4) liberty deserves to be served with more passion than tyranny.

The penalty for not following them is summed up in one episode: “During the retreat from Flanders, on the road from Vimy, an old French peasant woman, standing on her doorstep and watching the procession of refugees stream by, said to me sadly: ‘The pity of it, Captain! Such a great country. . . .’ ”

Clare Boothe is the author of Broadway hits, The Women, Kiss the Boys Goodbye, Margin for Error. Last February she decided to go to Europe, find out what the war was about. What she saw & heard, what she thought & felt, she has put into Europe in the Spring.

First she went to Italy. She had an audience with the Pope, she talked for two hours with Count Ciano. He told her he was an unsuccessful playwright, he liked to keep a diary, he did not like grand opera. What he thought about Italy’s going to war he did not tell her. She tried to get it out of him by observing what a pity it would be if all the nice buildings Mussolini had built “became prematurely ruins. It would be so much nicer to have the excavating done by the archaeologists of 2042.” He just said: “The kind of ruins you get after a modern war wouldn’t be worth excavating.”

So she went to Paris. There everybody’s morale was fine. Everybody said: “Il faut en finir”—”This time we must put an end to it.” “So many Frenchmen said: ‘Anyone can see that if Hitler doesn’t attack now, at the peak of his strength, he’s doomed.’ And when you asked: ‘Then why doesn’t he attack now?’ they replied, with vast Gallic shrugs, ‘Undoubtedly because he knows he’s doomed anyway.’ So, the stalemate on the western front was widely explained as ‘Hitler’s realization of the economic impasse he’s got himself into.’ ” Said the Paris-soir with an air of wisdom: “If Hitler attacks this spring, it will be a sign of either great German strength or great weakness.” There was much talk about Hitler’s secret weapon. But scoffers asked: “What secret weapon could he have—besides those dive bombers and tanks he used in Poland, which was a weak, unprepared country, and couldn’t take it?” Colonel (Count) Radziwill, a military refugee, grew angry at this one day. Said he fiercely: “. . . It was not the tanks and bombers. . . . It was the way the Germans used them. They used them in a new way. In a war of movement!” “Ah, mon vieux, comme vous etes naif!” said an old French general. “A war of movement across the dry Polish plains, oui! But through the Ardennes, through the Dutch floods, through the Belgian defenses, through the Maginot . . . c’est ridicule!”

Clare Boothe went to England to look at “this happy breed of men, these sunning English.” “The cuckoo, the nightingale and the swallow had returned to all the London parks.” Some of the sandbags had begun to sprout green things because instead of being filled with sand, they had been filled with plain black dirt. Norway had been lost. In upper-class English drawing rooms they were saying: “England always loses every battle but the last one.” Asked about Norway, the chambermaid said: ” ‘Orrible! ‘Orrible! But I ‘ear we gave ’em what for: killed millions more of them than they did of ours and that’s certain.”

So Authoress Boothe went to Holland a few days before the Nazis did. Herr Snouck Hurgronje told her the Germans were expected: “The same sources have informed our Government so which informed it five days before the German invasion of Norway.” They had not warned the British and French. “Certainly not. . . . They’re not our allies.” He added: “It’s just another agony to fear what cannot be prevented or conquered.” Nazi warplanes caught up with Miss Boothe in Brussels; she fled to Paris. It was Maytime. “Now at the Gare du Nord and the Gard de 1’Est, where the trains come in from the north, you could very clearly hear the sobs of the refugees. . . . They came off the trains with their bewildered faces, white faces, bloody faces, faces beaten out of human shape by the Niagaras of human tears that had flowed down them. The plain and tragic and innocent faces of the people, the people who ‘must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with,’ as Sheridan said.” “An old [French] Red Cross nurse . . . put down the bowl of broth she was ladling out to the refugees and . . . took my arm. . . . ‘Madame,’ she said, ‘you are an American?’ I said: ‘Yes,’ and she went on: ‘Then you must tell me the truth: qui nous a trahi? Who has betrayed us?’ ”

Then Authoress Boothe went back to England. While waiting for a plane at Le Bourget, she found something unique in Europe’s spring—a man who knew what the score was. He was a Frenchman. “Do not despair, madame,” he said, “I do not despair. . . . This is a world revolution, and when we people of the democracies see what we have lost in money and life and human dignity by not sticking together, we will start our own counterrevolution to unite the world.” He had been one of the last survivors in a trench at Verdun. ” ‘Since that day,’ the little grey-haired diplomat said, ‘I have had my motto: . . . There are no hopeless situations; there are only men who have grown hopeless about them.’ “