Foreign News: Concrete Guy

On June 13, 1777 the Marquis de La fayette stepped ashore at Georgetown, S. C., to help the U. S. win its War of Independence. Last June, 163 years later—less one day—Lafayette’s great-great-great-grandson (and therefore an honorary U. S. citizen before being born), Count René de Chambrun, stepped ashore at LaGuardia Field’s marine base to try to speed help from the U. S. to hard-pressed France.

René de Chambrun, a captain of French infantry, is a wiry little man of 33, with the late Nick Longworth for an uncle, a profitable knowledge of the law, both French and American, a host of important connections, a taste for driving too fast in an automobile and an inborn capacity for landing out of any catastrophe on his feet. With all these qualifications, he was unable to do his job for France. Ten days after he arrived in the U. S., at the moment when he was pleading his country’s case at a luncheon of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, General Charles Huntziger was signing the armistice agreement with Herr Hitler in a railway car in the Forest of Compiègne.

So Rene de Chambrun, on railway trains, in airplanes, in hotel rooms, did the next best thing. He wrote a book about how it all happened. Titled I Saw France Fall, it was published this week. Because he had a first-row seat on the Flanders and Lorraine Fronts for nine months, because he happens to have an extraordinary sense of scene and because his book is the first full-length account of how France’s 33rd invasion looked to a front soldier, I Saw France Fall is a document of first importance.

Lieutenant de Chambrun, of St. Cyr and the infantry reserve, got his call on the early morning of Aug. 23 when two policemen came to his Paris apartment and notified him to join his unit. “This time,” said the officer, “it means business.” His wife José, Pierre Laval’s daughter, took him to the Gare de l’Est and business began. Business for René de Chambrun was to be conducted with the 162nd Régiment d’Infanterie de Forteresse, 140 steps down in the Maginot Line’s Fort of Rotherberg in Lorraine. Like a sunken battleship, the fortress throbbed eight hours a day as Diesels pumped in air and light. At 10 o’clock the motors stopped. The lights went out. Then sleep in Chambrun’s concrete cell battled with claustrophobia. The first night he had to climb up to the iron entrance and gasp for fresh air through the crack above the concrete sill. “Just pretend you are a monk living in the Middle Ages,” counseled Bentz, his cellmate. After a month of living like a mole, Chambrun became acclimatized, even got to like his mole life. He became a full-fledged gars du béton, a Concrete Guy. An old traveler in American upper berths, he could even show his men how to take their pants off in their hammocks, and when he awakened in the morning, Bentz would ask in sepulchral tones: “Dear brother, have you slept well?”

Before he was made a captain he was given the job of liaison officer between the one and only British brigade front (two miles) and the French Army, and terrestrial life began anew. He encountered an amazingly well-organized reconnaissance raid by picked, leather-jacketed German Stosstruppen. There was Christmas Eve dinner with the Black Watch (this war was just one more between the Scots and the Germans). Queen Elizabeth sent them all plum puddings. There was the visit of George VI, when the King held his salute for a battalion of chasseurs a pied until the last little proud-eyed rear guard quick-stepped by. Then there was the Blitzkrieg.

Once he shot a fifth columnist spreading disorganization among the Belgian refugees. Once he went to Arras for information for General Blanchard and came close to getting trapped while two British officers held him over whiskey and “good stories.” A Belgian fortress officer told him how treachery had robbed him of a third of his troops the night before the invasion. He was given dispatches to General Weygand, dodged a Panzer column and got through Dunkirk, out to Britain and back to Paris. When Calais fell he was on a train to London, watching the English boys in their towns playing football.

Back to the U. S. and then back to France in August, Chambrun has a last scene with a LIFE photographer in the Roman amphitheatre under the moon at Nimes. “Two million Germans are occupying our soil today. They are the successors of the Romans, the Arabs, the Vikings, the Spaniards, the Flemish, the British, and many other Germans; but after every other invasion France always succeeds France. She remains herself, like these old stones from Provence which the Romans hauled down from the mountains in their attempt to colonize once for all the land which Caesar captured from Vercingeto-rix.”