The notes for each chapter are preceded by a list of ... - Vintage Books

Dossier: no. 8911 Jones, W. R. Findings of the Court of Inquiry, 9 June 1919:
Inquiring into the death of 8911 Sapper William Robert Jones of Second
Australian Divisional Signal Company.
22 AN 3W142, Louis Darquier military file.
23 Henri-Philippe Pétain (1856–1951): born in a village in Pas-de-Calais, that
part of northern France which most resembles England. Of peasant stock and
Catholic education, the army cemented these early conservative and rural influences.
After a long and undistinguished military career, Pétain’s life and reputation
were revolutionised by the First World War, which offered him rapid
promotion. Three-quarters of the French army served at Verdun, and thus he
was the hero of almost all the eight million French soldiers who survived the
war. Constantly seen as a symbol of national unity, as a republican marshal, as
a leader in waiting, behind his carefully maintained public persona he remained
an ambitious man, always pessimistic, suspicious and vain, hostile to a parliamentary
government and its politicians, to Bolsheviks, socialists and
Freemasons, and wedded to military tactics which were to be disastrous for
France in the decades which followed the war. Between 1920 and 1939, Pétain
remained a key military figure and adviser, sat on or headed a multitude of
military committees and posts, and was omnipresent in the formulation of
French military policy. He became ambassador to Spain in March 1939, after
which he fulfilled H.G. Wells’s most apt description of his strange personality
as ‘an artlessly sincere megalomaniac’. Pétain maintained a life of constant
womanising before and after his marriage in 1920, at the age of sixty-four,
to the divorcée Eugénie Hardon; she remained loyal to him until his death
in exile, senile and suffering from hallucinations, at the age of ninety-five.
The Association pour Défendre La Mémoire du Maréchal Pétain, whose honorary
chairman until 1965 was Maxime Weygand, continues to campaign for Pétain’s
rehabilitation.
24 Maxime Weygand (1867–1965): Not French, but a wiry and dapper Belgian
who looked like ‘an aged jockey’. A vigorous Catholic, Weygand matched every
opinion Pétain kept carefully to himself with outspoken dabbling in most of
the right-wing movements of the post-war period. Said to be the illegitimate
son of, perhaps, Leopold II, King of Belgium, or of the king’s sister Carlotta,
wife of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, or possibly of others, he shared Louis
Darquier’s violent anti-Semitism – and like Darquier lived in an aura of ancestral
mysteries, real or imagined. He also shared an inability to take orders, a
passion for giving them and considerable indulgence in intemperate behaviour.
Weygand was anti-Dreyfus, deeply influenced by Charles Maurras, close to la
Roque and Croix-de-feu, he was a hero of Taittinger’s and rumoured to be an
honorary member of Jeunesses Patriotes. As an army man who more than
dabbled in politics, in 1936 Weygand was devastated by the election of the
Popular Front in general, and hysterical about Léon Blum, the Jew, in particular.