Tragfdy in France

THIS is a foretaste of the literature that will be evoked by the tragedy of World War II. Maurois seeks to convey to the world why France collapsed. There’s no recrimination, no invective; even the adjectives are restrained. But the record is every whit as sorry as the venomed chronicle of André Simone. The author goes over well-worn ground — the defense complex of the French general staff, the lack of preparedness, the antipathy to work and discipline which had arisen in France, the canker-like jealousies and ineptitude of the politicians. Faith is needed in order to fight. And faith had been so eroded in France that even a declaration of war couldn’t bring it back to flaming life. But here and there was heroism of the purest quality. The man who wrote The Miracle of England finds the key to the miracle in the British soldiery. Their faith hadn’t been tarnished. They rediscovered the quality which Trevelyan says is typical of the Briton. British engineers, unafraid of the armor-weighted motorcyclists dashing miles ahead of the Nazi armies, coolly killed them with their shovels and pickaxes. Young officers of the R. A. F. grimly wrote off their victims as if they’d been big-game hunting. For his beloved France, now under the conqueror’s heel, Maurois keeps his finest passages. France is his garden, where men and women are going back to work and discipline, intent upon recapturing the faith which the postwar years had undermined. Soon or late a new France will arise. And it will again give to the world the model for the pleasure that civilized man can take in ‘delicious simplicity.’ One closes this book, a chronicle that up to this epilogue lives and breathes and dies with the classic poignancy of a Greek tragedy, with a hope that Maurois will yet live to proclaim the dawn of French regeneration.