The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

would agree to join the fight. If they would not, would Britain agree that it
was now impossible for France to continue? Churchill told him that Britain
would fight on. She would never surrender. Churchill felt deep sympathy
for France’s agony but could not agree to a French armistice. In the
courtyard below, a number of French commanders and politicians gathered
to see the British go. Amidst embraces, handshakes and tears, the Prime
Minister and his entourage left France for the last time.
Paris fell the next day. Between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., Leutnant Siegfried
Knappe and his gunners in the 87th Division marched thirty miles, before
taking up a position along the Marne River; in the distance they could see
the Eiffel Tower. At 9 p.m., they were suddenly ordered to a position on the
Ourcq Canal, where apparently some French sailors drafted in for the
defence of Paris were still resisting. Siegfried went forward with the
infantry, who were being pinned down by small-arms fire from the
basement of a house on the far side of the canal beside a bridge. Siegfried
called up one of his 105 mm guns, and from the cover of a building on their
side of the canal the gun was brought up and readied. ‘At my command,’
Siegfried told his men, ‘we will push the gun around the corner and I will
aim the gun and give the order to fire. Everyone understand?’ His men
nodded. ‘Let’s go!’ shouted Siegfried.
As they pushed it round, pinpoints of fire flashed from the building
opposite. Quickly, they aimed the gun and pulled the trigger, then flattened
themselves on the ground. Siegfried knew he had been hit on his left wrist,
but as he looked up only smoke now came from the basement. The French
firing had ceased. Siegfried now looked at his wound. A bullet had passed
through the back of his hand and out by his wrist. It was oozing blood, but
felt numb. He then noticed a hole through the side of his jacket, his sleeve
and his map case, and realized he had been extremely lucky. ‘The bridge
was now open to us,’ noted Siegfried, ‘and the next morning the division
was in Paris.’
In brief moments between his duties for the PM, Jock Colville was reading
War and Peace. He never seemed to be able to finish it, but on the day Paris
fell had got to the point where the French were entering Moscow. It was, he
felt, in some ways analogous. He also seemed taken with Churchill’s idea
for a Breton Redoubt, drawing his own Napoleonic analogy. ‘If the French