Chapter 1
Leaping into the Unknown
Her sister’s drawing room was already crowded when Marie-Madeleine Fourcade arrived. In one corner, Georges, her brother-in-law, was deep in discussion with a cluster of male guests. Spotting her sister in another corner, Marie-Madeleine crossed the room to join her.
Yvonne introduced her to several women, who, after acknowledging the newcomer, returned to their conversation about children, their latest travels, and their incessant problems with servants. At one point, between sips of tea, a small, birdlike woman named Yvonne de Gaulle held forth on the soothing virtues of the countryside and how important it was to have a house in the country where a busy man like her husband could find a quiet refuge.
Her attention wandering, Marie-Madeleine glanced around the room. She recognized several of the men—a number of them military officers like Georges, along with a scattering of diplomats, journalists, and business leaders. Ever since she’d returned to Paris, her sister and brother-in-law had included her in their circle of influential friends, many of whom frequented the lively late-afternoon salon that the couple had established at their apartment on rue Vaneau, not far from the French capital’s government ministries and embassies.
She caught the eye of Georges, who beckoned to her. As she joined the group around him, she was aware of the appreciative glances directed her way. Cool and elegant, with porcelain skin and high cheekbones, the twenty-six-year-old blonde was used to being the object of male scrutiny.
After introducing her to a couple of guests she had not yet met, Georges mentioned her passion for cars and fast driving and boasted about her success in a recent long-distance car rally. For a minute or two, she and the others debated the merits of various cars, including the speedy model she owned—a Citroën Traction Avant. But the conversation soon returned to the subject that had preoccupied the men from the moment they had arrived that afternoon: Nazi Germany’s shocking occupation of the demilitarized Rhineland just a few weeks before.
On March 7, 1936, German troops had marched into the Rhineland, a strip of western Germany straddling the Rhine River and bordering France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands. After Germany’s defeat in World War I, the area had been declared a buffer zone, and a ban had been imposed on any installation there of German forces or fortifications. Adolf Hitler’s defiance of the ban was his most flagrant violation to date of the 1919 Versailles Treaty and his most dramatic challenge thus far to the Western allies Britain and France.
If either country had responded with force, Hitler’s troops, as he later acknowledged, would have retreated immediately. But neither the British nor French lifted a finger to stop the incursion—a failure that appalled those at Georges and Yvonne’s salon on that lovely April afternoon.
Several of the guests were army intelligence officers, who, for the last three years, had been providing information to the French government detailing Hitler’s mounting preparations for war. Indeed, in the past few months they had passed on advance intelligence of the Rhineland incursion itself. To all these warnings, government officials and the top military command had paid little heed.
The top brass were equally indifferent to increasingly urgent calls by some of their underlings for the modernization and reform of the French military. As one observer later put it, “The minds of the French generals had ground to a halt and were already thickly coated with rust.” In their preparations for a future war, members of the high command remained committed to the kind of defensive warfare that had eventually brought the Allies, at an extremely high cost, a victory in World War I. They paid little or no attention to the swift technological advances in the development of such offensive weapons as planes and tanks. They also went out of their way to block the advancement of younger, more vigorous officers who preached the need for a revolution in military tactics and strategy.
Two of the most prominent members of that younger group—Lieutenant Colonel Charles de Gaulle and Major Georges Loustaunau-Lacau—took center stage in the discussion on rue Vaneau, engaging in a debate that quickly escalated into a full-blown argument. It soon became obvious to Marie-Madeleine that the two officers viewed each other as rivals, which, considering how much they had in common, was perhaps not surprising.
They both were products of Saint-Cyr, France’s foremost military academy, and the elite École Supérieure de Guerre, the country’s graduate war college. Both had fought in World War I, been wounded, and received multiple citations for bravery. After the war, they had served at different times on the staff of Marshal Philippe Pétain, the hero of the Battle of Verdun, who had held several key postwar posts—commander in chief of the army, inspector general, and minister of war. The forty-five-year-old de Gaulle and the forty-two-year-old Loustaunau-Lacau were brilliant, ambitious, and egocentric, with a rebellious streak that had gotten them in considerable trouble at various times with Pétain and other military superiors. Each loved the spotlight, and neither wanted to share it with the other.
After Germany occupied the Rhineland, de Gaulle had submitted an article predicting its disastrous consequences to the influential journal Défense Nationale, which refused to publish it. Now, leaning against the apartment’s fireplace mantel, he criticized the high command’s tactical and strategic ineptness, blasting its reliance on prepared fortifications like the Maginot Line and arguing for creation of a fast-moving mechanized army working closely with and supported by aircraft. Loustaunau-Lacau interrupted, dismissing de Gaulle’s idea of a strike force as unworkable. As they argued, they seemed to agree on only one point: If the French military were not immediately reshaped, the army would collapse, and the country would be crushed by Germany in a war that was drawing ever closer.
Fascinated by the verbal fireworks between them, Fourcade had no idea of the profound impact that both men would soon have on her life.
Copyright © 2019 by Lynne Olson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
