Fall of Giants

It was the wrong thing to say, for it brought forth fresh sobs.

Fitz looked at his wristwatch. It was half past eight. He had to be back at his hotel by ten o’clock without fail.

Gini said: “If the Germans come, will you take care of me?”

“Of course, chérie,” he said, suppressing a guilty pang. He would if he could, but she would not be his top priority.

“Will they come?” she asked in a small voice.

Fitz wished he knew. The German army was twice as numerous as predicted by French intelligence. It had stormed across northeast France, winning every battle. Now the avalanche had reached a line north of Paris-exactly how far north, Fitz would find out in the next couple of hours.

“Some say the city will not be defended,” Gini sobbed. “Is it true?”

Fitz did not know that either. If Paris resisted, it would be mauled by German artillery. Its splendid buildings would be wrecked, its broad boulevards cratered, its bistros and boutiques turned to rubble. It was tempting to think the city should surrender, and escape all that. “It might be better for you,” he said to Gini with false heartiness. “You will make love to a fat Prussian general who will call you his Liebling.”

“I don’t want a Prussian.” Her voice sank to a whisper. “I love you.”

Perhaps she did, he thought; or perhaps she just saw him as a ticket out of here. Everyone who could was leaving town, but it was not easy. Most private cars had been commandeered. Railway trains were liable to be requisitioned at any moment, their civilian passengers thrown out and stranded in the middle of nowhere. A taxi to Bordeaux cost fifteen hundred francs, the price of a small house.

“It may not happen,” he told her. “The Germans must be exhausted by now. They’ve been marching and fighting for a month. They can’t keep it up forever.”

He half believed this. The French had fought hard in retreat. The soldiers were worn out, starving and demoralized, but few had been taken prisoner and they had lost only a handful of guns. The unflappable commander in chief, General Joffre, had held the Allied forces together and withdrawn to a line southeast of Paris, where he was regrouping. He had also ruthlessly sacked senior French officers who did not come up to scratch: two army commanders, seven corps commanders, and dozens of others had been mercilessly dismissed.

The Germans did not know this. Fitz had seen decrypted German messages that suggested overconfidence. The German high command had actually removed troops from France and sent them as reinforcements to East Prussia. Fitz thought that might be a mistake. The French were not finished yet.

He was not so sure about the British.

The British Expeditionary Force was small-five and a half divisions, by contrast with the seventy French divisions in the field. They had fought bravely at Mons, making Fitz proud; but in five days they had lost fifteen thousand of their one hundred thousand men, and had gone into retreat.

The Welsh Rifles were part of the British force, but Fitz was not with them. At first he had been disappointed to be posted to Paris as a liaison officer: he yearned to be fighting with his regiment. He felt sure the generals were treating him as an amateur who had to be sent someplace where he could not do much harm. But he knew Paris and spoke French, so he could hardly deny that he was well-qualified.

As it turned out, the job was more important than he had thought. Relations between the French commanders and their British opposite numbers were dangerously bad. The British Expeditionary Force was commanded by a touchy fusspot whose name, slightly confusingly, was Sir John French. He had taken offense, early on, by what he saw as a lack of consultation by General Joffre, and had gone into a sulk. Fitz struggled to maintain a flow of information and intelligence between the two Allied commanders despite the atmosphere of hostility.

All this was embarrassing and a bit shameful, and Fitz as a representative of the British was mortified by the ill-disguised scorn of French officers. But it had got dramatically worse a week ago. Sir John had told Joffre that his troops required two days’ rest. The next day he had changed his requirement to ten days. The French had been horrified, and Fitz had felt deeply ashamed of his own country.

He had remonstrated with Colonel Hervey, a sycophantic aide to Sir John, but his complaint had met with indignation and denial. In the end Fitz had spoken by phone to Lord Remarc, a junior minister in the War Office. They had been schoolboys at Eton together, and Remarc was one of Maud’s gossipy friends. Fitz had not felt good about going behind the backs of his superior officers this way, but the struggle for Paris was so finely balanced that he felt he had to act. Patriotism was not so simple, he had learned.